Uncharted Depths: Exploring Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a conflicted spirit. He even composed a verse named The Two Voices, where contrasting facets of himself argued the pros and cons of ending his life. Within this revealing volume, the biographer elects to spotlight on the more obscure character of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 became pivotal for Alfred. He unveiled the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost two decades. As a result, he emerged as both famous and wealthy. He entered matrimony, following a extended courtship. Previously, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or residing alone in a rundown dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Then he acquired a house where he could receive prominent visitors. He became poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but attractive
Lineage Struggles
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating susceptible to emotional swings and sadness. His paternal figure, a hesitant priest, was volatile and regularly inebriated. There was an occurrence, the facts of which are vague, that led to the household servant being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a child and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another endured severe melancholy and copied his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself experienced bouts of debilitating sadness and what he termed “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must often have questioned whether he could become one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, messy but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a gathering. But, maturing crowded with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an small space – as an mature individual he desired isolation, retreating into stillness when in social settings, disappearing for lonely walking tours.
Existential Fears and Turmoil of Belief
In that period, geologists, astronomers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were introducing appalling questions. If the story of existence had commenced eons before the emergence of the mankind, then how to believe that the world had been created for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely formed for mankind, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The modern telescopes and microscopes uncovered areas vast beyond measure and creatures infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s faith, in light of such evidence, in a divine being who had created man in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then could the humanity do so too?
Persistent Motifs: Sea Monster and Bond
Holmes binds his account together with dual recurrent themes. The primary he introduces early on – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “ancient legends, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the brief verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something vast, indescribable and sad, concealed out of reach of investigation, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of metre and as the originator of symbols in which awful unknown is condensed into a few dazzlingly indicative lines.
The additional element is the contrast. Where the imaginary beast represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is loving and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive lines with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a appreciation message in poetry depicting him in his flower bed with his pet birds perching all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, wrist and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of pleasure nicely suited to FitzGerald’s significant praise of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb foolishness of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “two owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a wren” made their nests.
