The Boundless Deep: Exploring Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself existed as a conflicted individual. He even composed a piece titled The Two Voices, where two aspects of the poet contemplated the pros and cons of ending his life. Within this revealing volume, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the overlooked character of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
In the year 1850 proved to be crucial for Alfred. He published the great collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for almost a long period. Therefore, he emerged as both celebrated and rich. He got married, after a long engagement. Earlier, he had been living in leased properties with his relatives, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or residing in solitude in a dilapidated house on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Now he acquired a house where he could entertain notable guests. He assumed the role of the official poet. His career as a renowned figure commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking
Lineage Challenges
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting susceptible to temperament and melancholy. His paternal figure, a unwilling minister, was volatile and frequently intoxicated. Transpired an incident, the facts of which are obscure, that caused the domestic worker being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a youth and stayed there for his entire existence. Another endured severe despair and followed his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself suffered from periods of overwhelming gloom and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must often have wondered whether he was one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, messy but good-looking. Even before he started wearing a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a space. But, having grown up in close quarters with his siblings – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an adult he desired solitude, retreating into silence when in social settings, disappearing for individual excursions.
Philosophical Concerns and Turmoil of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the evolution, were posing disturbing questions. If the history of life on Earth had started ages before the arrival of the human race, then how to hold that the world had been made for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only made for us, who live on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The recent optical instruments and lenses exposed spaces infinitely large and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s faith, considering such evidence, in a God who had made man in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then could the mankind do so too?
Persistent Themes: Kraken and Companionship
The author ties his narrative together with two persistent elements. The first he establishes at the beginning – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line poem establishes ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and mournful, concealed out of reach of human understanding, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the originator of images in which dreadful mystery is compressed into a few strikingly indicative words.
The second motif is the contrast. Where the imaginary creature represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive verses with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a grateful note in rhyme portraying him in his flower bed with his pet birds sitting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, wrist and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of joy nicely suited to FitzGerald’s great praise of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent nonsense of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the old man with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, multiple birds and a small bird” made their dwellings.
