Uncharted Depths: Examining Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a divided soul. He produced a poem called The Two Voices, where two versions of himself argued the pros and cons of ending his life. In this revealing volume, the author elects to spotlight on the more obscure character of the writer.
A Critical Year: 1850
During 1850 became decisive for Tennyson. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost a long period. As a result, he became both celebrated and prosperous. He wed, following a long courtship. Earlier, he had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or staying alone in a rundown house on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Then he acquired a home where he could entertain distinguished guests. He became the national poet. His life as a Great Man commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even magnetic. He was very tall, messy but handsome
Ancestral Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting inclined to moods and melancholy. His parent, a hesitant clergyman, was irate and frequently inebriated. There was an event, the details of which are vague, that resulted in the household servant being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a mental institution as a youth and remained there for his entire existence. Another endured severe melancholy and copied his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of overwhelming gloom and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His work Maud is told by a lunatic: he must often have questioned whether he was one personally.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a gathering. But, maturing in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an attic room – as an adult he craved privacy, escaping into stillness when in company, vanishing for solitary walking tours.
Deep Anxieties and Upheaval of Conviction
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Darwin about the origin of species, were posing disturbing inquiries. If the story of life on Earth had commenced eons before the emergence of the human race, then how to believe that the world had been made for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only created for mankind, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The new telescopes and microscopes exposed spaces vast beyond measure and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s faith, in light of such findings, in a divine being who had made mankind in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then could the humanity meet the same fate?
Persistent Themes: Kraken and Bond
Holmes binds his account together with dual recurrent themes. The primary he introduces at the beginning – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the short verse introduces themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something enormous, indescribable and tragic, concealed out of reach of human understanding, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a master of rhythm and as the originator of images in which terrible enigma is packed into a few brilliantly evocative phrases.
The second motif is the counterpart. Where the fictional creature epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is fond and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive lines with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, hand and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of joy nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent foolishness of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, several songbirds and a wren” made their homes.