Uncharted Depths: Examining Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson existed as a conflicted spirit. He famously wrote a poem called The Two Voices, wherein two versions of his personality contemplated the arguments of ending his life. In this insightful work, the author elects to spotlight on the lesser known identity of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: 1850
During 1850 was decisive for the poet. He published the great verse series In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for close to two decades. Therefore, he became both famous and rich. He got married, subsequent to a extended engagement. Before that, he had been living in leased properties with his relatives, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or residing by himself in a rundown house on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate shores. At that point he moved into a residence where he could entertain distinguished visitors. He was appointed poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome
Lineage Struggles
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting susceptible to emotional swings and depression. His paternal figure, a reluctant priest, was angry and frequently drunk. Transpired an occurrence, the facts of which are vague, that resulted in the family cook being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and lived there for his entire existence. Another endured profound depression and copied his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself suffered from periods of overwhelming despair and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have pondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome. Prior to he adopted a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could control a room. But, having grown up in close quarters with his siblings – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he craved solitude, retreating into stillness when in groups, vanishing for individual excursions.
Existential Concerns and Crisis of Conviction
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, astronomers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing frightening inquiries. If the timeline of existence had started ages before the appearance of the humanity, then how to hold that the world had been formed for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely formed for mankind, who live on a minor world of a common sun.” The new viewing devices and microscopes revealed realms vast beyond measure and creatures infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s faith, in light of such findings, in a God who had created man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the humanity follow suit?
Persistent Elements: Sea Monster and Bond
The biographer weaves his account together with a pair of persistent elements. The primary he presents early on – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young student when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the 15-line sonnet establishes themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, hidden beyond reach of investigation, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a master of rhythm and as the creator of metaphors in which awful enigma is packed into a few strikingly suggestive words.
The other element is the counterpart. Where the imaginary sea monster symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is loving and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest lines with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in poetry depicting him in his flower bed with his pet birds perching all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on arm, palm and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of joy nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s notable praise of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb nonsense of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, four larks and a small bird” made their dwellings.
