Uncharted Depths: Examining Young Tennyson's Restless Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a torn soul. He even composed a verse called The Two Voices, in which contrasting versions of the poet contemplated the pros and cons of self-destruction. In this insightful book, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the overlooked character of the poet.
A Defining Year: 1850
In the year 1850 was decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the significant verse series In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost twenty years. Therefore, he grew both famous and wealthy. He got married, subsequent to a long engagement. Previously, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or residing by himself in a ramshackle cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Then he moved into a residence where he could receive distinguished guests. He was appointed the national poet. His life as a renowned figure started.
Even as a youth he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but attractive
Ancestral Struggles
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning prone to temperament and sadness. His father, a reluctant priest, was irate and regularly inebriated. There was an incident, the facts of which are unclear, that caused the family cook being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and remained there for life. Another endured severe depression and followed his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself endured periods of debilitating sadness and what he termed “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a madman: he must frequently have pondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but good-looking. Even before he started wearing a dark cloak and headwear, he could control a space. But, maturing crowded with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an small space – as an mature individual he sought out isolation, withdrawing into stillness when in company, vanishing for lonely walking tours.
Existential Fears and Turmoil of Conviction
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing appalling inquiries. If the story of life on Earth had commenced millions of years before the appearance of the humanity, then how to maintain that the world had been created for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only formed for humanity, who live on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The recent viewing devices and magnifying tools revealed realms infinitely large and organisms infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s religion, considering such evidence, in a God who had made humanity in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then might the human race meet the same fate?
Recurrent Motifs: Kraken and Companionship
The biographer weaves his story together with a pair of persistent motifs. The primary he introduces initially – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young student when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the short poem presents ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something enormous, unspeakable and mournful, submerged inaccessible of human understanding, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a master of metre and as the author of images in which terrible unknown is packed into a few dazzlingly suggestive phrases.
The additional element is the contrast. Where the mythical sea monster epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive verses with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a thank-you letter in poetry depicting him in his garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on back, palm and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an image of pleasure nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent foolishness of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, four larks and a wren” built their nests.
