The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted spirit. He famously wrote a verse named The Two Voices, where contrasting versions of his personality debated the merits of self-destruction. In this revealing book, the author decides to concentrate on the overlooked character of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
In the year 1850 was decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the great verse series In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for almost two decades. Consequently, he grew both famous and rich. He wed, subsequent to a long relationship. Previously, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Then he acquired a house where he could host prominent callers. He was appointed poet laureate. His career as a Great Man commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was striking, even charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome
Lineage Struggles
His family, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning susceptible to moods and sadness. His paternal figure, a unwilling priest, was irate and very often inebriated. Occurred an occurrence, the details of which are unclear, that resulted in the family cook being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a lunatic asylum as a child and lived there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from severe despair and copied his father into alcoholism. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of debilitating despair and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is told by a madman: he must regularly have questioned whether he could become one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was striking, almost charismatic. He was of great height, messy but attractive. Before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a gathering. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an adult he sought out solitude, withdrawing into stillness when in social settings, disappearing for solitary walking tours.
Philosophical Fears and Crisis of Belief
In that period, geologists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the evolution, were posing disturbing inquiries. If the timeline of living beings had begun eons before the arrival of the human race, then how to hold that the earth had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply made for us, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The modern optical instruments and lenses revealed realms immensely huge and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s belief, in light of such proof, in a divine being who had made man in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the human race follow suit?
Repeating Elements: Mythical Beast and Companionship
The biographer binds his narrative together with two recurring elements. The first he establishes early on – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the short verse establishes concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something enormous, unspeakable and mournful, concealed inaccessible of investigation, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of metre and as the creator of symbols in which terrible mystery is compressed into a few dazzlingly indicative words.
The additional motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary sea monster symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is fond and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive lines with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a appreciation message in poetry depicting him in his garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, hand and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of joy nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb absurdity of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “two owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a wren” constructed their dwellings.
