Uncharted Depths: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a conflicted soul. He famously wrote a piece called The Two Voices, wherein two facets of himself argued the pros and cons of self-destruction. Within this revealing volume, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known identity of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
During 1850 was crucial for the poet. He unveiled the great collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had worked for almost a long period. As a result, he became both renowned and prosperous. He wed, after a long engagement. Before that, he had been living in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or residing alone in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Now he moved into a residence where he could entertain prominent visitors. He assumed the role of the national poet. His career as a celebrated individual commenced.
From his teens he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting prone to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a unwilling priest, was irate and very often inebriated. Occurred an event, the particulars of which are vague, that led to the household servant being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a child and stayed there for his entire existence. Another experienced severe despair and emulated his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of overwhelming despair and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is narrated by a madman: he must often have questioned whether he could become one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive. Before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a room. But, being raised in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an adult he sought out privacy, escaping into stillness when in social settings, vanishing for lonely walking tours.
Existential Anxieties and Turmoil of Belief
During his era, geologists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were introducing frightening questions. If the history of existence had commenced millions of years before the appearance of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been formed for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was only made for us, who live on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The new optical instruments and microscopes revealed realms immensely huge and organisms infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s faith, in light of such findings, in a divine being who had made mankind in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then would the mankind do so too?
Persistent Motifs: Sea Monster and Friendship
The author ties his story together with a pair of recurrent motifs. The primary he presents initially – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short verse establishes themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something vast, unutterable and sad, submerged inaccessible of human inquiry, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a master of verse and as the originator of metaphors in which dreadful unknown is condensed into a few dazzlingly evocative phrases.
The additional element is the counterpart. Where the mythical sea monster epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is fond and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic verses with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, penned a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his garden with his pet birds resting all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on arm, palm and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an image of pleasure perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb absurdity of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, multiple birds and a tiny creature” constructed their homes.