The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted individual. He produced a piece named The Two Voices, in which two aspects of the poet contemplated the arguments of ending his life. Through this illuminating book, the author chooses to focus on the overlooked persona of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: 1850
In the year 1850 proved to be decisive for the poet. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for almost a long period. Therefore, he emerged as both celebrated and wealthy. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a long engagement. Before that, he had been residing in leased properties with his relatives, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or staying by himself in a dilapidated cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. At that point he moved into a house where he could entertain distinguished visitors. He assumed the role of the national poet. His life as a Great Man started.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating susceptible to emotional swings and melancholy. His parent, a reluctant priest, was irate and very often inebriated. There was an occurrence, the facts of which are unclear, that caused the family cook being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a child and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from profound depression and emulated his father into drinking. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of overwhelming gloom and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is told by a insane person: he must frequently have questioned whether he was one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was commanding, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but good-looking. Before he adopted a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a room. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an small space – as an adult he desired privacy, retreating into silence when in social settings, retreating for lonely walking tours.
Deep Fears and Turmoil of Belief
In that period, earth scientists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the origin of species, were raising appalling queries. If the timeline of existence had started eons before the emergence of the humanity, then how to hold that the earth had been created for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply formed for humanity, who live on a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The modern optical instruments and lenses uncovered spaces infinitely large and beings infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s belief, in light of such evidence, in a deity who had formed humanity in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then would the human race do so too?
Repeating Motifs: Kraken and Companionship
The author weaves his narrative together with two recurrent motifs. The primary he presents at the beginning – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young scholar when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line sonnet introduces themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something immense, unutterable and mournful, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a expert of metre and as the originator of symbols in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few strikingly indicative words.
The additional motif is the counterpart. Where the mythical sea monster symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is loving and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a grateful note in poetry portraying him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on back, wrist and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of delight excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s notable praise of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant foolishness of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, multiple birds and a tiny creature” made their homes.
