The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a divided individual. He even composed a verse named The Two Voices, in which dual versions of himself debated the arguments of ending his life. In this illuminating volume, the biographer chooses to focus on the more obscure character of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 was decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the great poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for close to a long period. Consequently, he emerged as both famous and rich. He entered matrimony, following a extended engagement. Previously, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his family members, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or staying alone in a rundown dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Then he moved into a residence where he could host distinguished callers. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His life as a renowned figure started.
From his teens he was striking, even glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking
Family Challenges
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting susceptible to temperament and depression. His parent, a hesitant priest, was volatile and regularly drunk. Transpired an incident, the details of which are vague, that caused the household servant being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and remained there for the rest of his days. Another endured severe depression and copied his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself endured episodes of debilitating sadness and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is told by a lunatic: he must regularly have questioned whether he could become one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, messy but attractive. Prior to he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could command a room. But, being raised crowded with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he desired solitude, retreating into stillness when in company, disappearing for individual walking tours.
Deep Fears and Turmoil of Conviction
In that period, geologists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the origin of species, were posing disturbing queries. If the history of life on Earth had started millions of years before the arrival of the mankind, then how to hold that the world had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply created for us, who live on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The new optical instruments and microscopes revealed spaces immensely huge and creatures infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s belief, given such findings, in a God who had made man in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then would the humanity meet the same fate?
Persistent Elements: Mythical Beast and Bond
The author ties his story together with dual recurrent motifs. The initial he introduces at the beginning – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “ancient legends, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the short sonnet presents concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something immense, unutterable and tragic, submerged inaccessible of investigation, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the originator of metaphors in which terrible mystery is condensed into a few brilliantly indicative lines.
The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary creature represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, penned a grateful note in poetry describing him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, wrist and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of pleasure perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s notable praise of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb foolishness of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a wren” constructed their homes.
