The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a divided individual. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, in which contrasting facets of his personality debated the arguments of suicide. In this revealing book, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the lesser known identity of the poet.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Alfred. He released the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for almost twenty years. Consequently, he grew both famous and prosperous. He got married, subsequent to a extended relationship. Earlier, he had been residing in leased properties with his family members, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or living alone in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. At that point he took a home where he could entertain prominent guests. He assumed the role of the national poet. His existence as a celebrated individual began.
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, messy but attractive
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting inclined to temperament and sadness. His father, a hesitant priest, was angry and very often inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the details of which are unclear, that led to the household servant being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a youth and remained there for life. Another suffered from deep despair and followed his father into alcoholism. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself endured episodes of overwhelming gloom and what he termed “weird seizures”. His Maud is told by a madman: he must regularly have wondered whether he could become one personally.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was striking, even glamorous. He was of great height, messy but handsome. Prior to he adopted a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could command a gathering. But, having grown up crowded with his family members – several relatives to an attic room – as an mature individual he craved solitude, withdrawing into stillness when in company, retreating for individual journeys.
Philosophical Concerns and Crisis of Conviction
In that period, geologists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were introducing disturbing queries. If the story of life on Earth had commenced millions of years before the appearance of the humanity, then how to hold that the planet had been made for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely formed for mankind, who live on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The recent viewing devices and microscopes exposed areas infinitely large and beings infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s religion, in light of such evidence, in a God who had made mankind in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then might the humanity meet the same fate?
Repeating Elements: Mythical Beast and Bond
The biographer ties his narrative together with dual recurrent themes. The first he presents at the beginning – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short sonnet establishes concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something enormous, unspeakable and sad, submerged out of reach of investigation, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of verse and as the creator of metaphors in which awful unknown is condensed into a few brilliantly evocative phrases.
The other motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical creature symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a thank-you letter in poetry depicting him in his rose garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, palm and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great praise of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent absurdity of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “two owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a tiny creature” constructed their nests.
