Uncharted Depths: Delving into Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself was known as a torn soul. He even composed a verse named The Two Voices, wherein contrasting versions of himself debated the pros and cons of ending his life. Within this illuminating volume, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the lesser known identity of the writer.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
In the year 1850 proved to be crucial for Alfred. He published the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for nearly two decades. Consequently, he grew both renowned and rich. He got married, following a extended relationship. Earlier, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or staying by himself in a rundown house on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Then he acquired a house where he could receive notable callers. He was appointed poet laureate. His existence as a Great Man started.
From his teens he was commanding, almost glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but handsome
Ancestral Challenges
His family, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning susceptible to temperament and melancholy. His parent, a hesitant clergyman, was angry and very often inebriated. Occurred an incident, the facts of which are obscure, that led to the household servant being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a mental institution as a child and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from profound melancholy and followed his father into alcoholism. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself endured periods of debilitating sadness and what he called “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must often have wondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was very tall, messy but attractive. Even before he adopted a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a gathering. But, maturing in close quarters with his siblings – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an mature individual he craved privacy, retreating into stillness when in groups, disappearing for individual excursions.
Philosophical Anxieties and Turmoil of Faith
In that period, earth scientists, astronomers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing appalling inquiries. If the history of life on Earth had commenced ages before the emergence of the mankind, then how to maintain that the world had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely formed for mankind, who live on a minor world of a common sun.” The modern viewing devices and microscopes uncovered realms immensely huge and organisms infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s belief, given such evidence, in a God who had made mankind in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then would the mankind follow suit?
Persistent Themes: Kraken and Bond
Holmes ties his narrative together with a pair of persistent elements. The initial he presents at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “ancient legends, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line verse introduces concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something vast, unutterable and tragic, hidden out of reach of investigation, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a master of metre and as the creator of metaphors in which awful mystery is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative phrases.
The other motif is the counterpart. Where the imaginary sea monster symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is fond and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest verses with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a grateful note in verse describing him in his rose garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on shoulder, palm and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of joy nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s great praise of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant absurdity of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, four larks and a small bird” made their dwellings.
