The Boundless Deep: Delving into Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a conflicted soul. He even composed a piece titled The Two Voices, in which contrasting aspects of himself contemplated the arguments of suicide. In this revealing book, the author chooses to focus on the lesser known persona of the writer.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 became decisive for Alfred. He unveiled the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for nearly a long period. As a result, he became both famous and rich. He entered matrimony, following a 14‑year courtship. Previously, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a dilapidated cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Now he moved into a house where he could host distinguished visitors. He became poet laureate. His career as a Great Man started.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but handsome
Family Turmoil
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting susceptible to temperament and depression. His father, a unwilling priest, was volatile and regularly inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the details of which are obscure, that caused the household servant being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and lived there for life. Another experienced severe depression and copied his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of paralysing sadness and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His work Maud is told by a madman: he must frequently have wondered whether he might turn into one personally.
The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but handsome. Prior to he adopted a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could control a gathering. But, having grown up crowded with his siblings – multiple siblings to an small space – as an adult he craved privacy, withdrawing into stillness when in groups, retreating for individual excursions.
Deep Fears and Upheaval of Belief
During his era, rock experts, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the origin of species, were introducing appalling questions. If the timeline of living beings had started eons before the appearance of the mankind, then how to maintain that the planet had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only made for mankind, who live on a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The recent viewing devices and lenses uncovered realms infinitely large and beings minutely tiny: how to keep one’s religion, considering such evidence, in a deity who had formed man in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then might the human race meet the same fate?
Repeating Elements: Sea Monster and Bond
The author binds his account together with dual persistent elements. The initial he introduces initially – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful student when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line sonnet introduces concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and sad, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of metre and as the creator of metaphors in which dreadful mystery is packed into a few brilliantly suggestive lines.
The second element is the contrast. Where the fictional sea monster represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is loving and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a grateful note in rhyme describing him in his garden with his tame doves perching all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on shoulder, hand and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of pleasure nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent absurdity of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, multiple birds and a wren” constructed their nests.
