Uncharted Depths: Examining Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a conflicted soul. He produced a piece titled The Two Voices, where two facets of the poet contemplated the pros and cons of suicide. Through this illuminating work, the author decides to concentrate on the lesser known character of the poet.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 was decisive for the poet. He published the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for nearly two decades. As a result, he emerged as both famous and rich. He got married, after a extended relationship. Previously, he had been residing in rented homes with his family members, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or staying in solitude in a ramshackle cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. At that point he moved into a residence where he could receive notable guests. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual began.
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but attractive
Family Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting inclined to moods and sadness. His father, a unwilling clergyman, was irate and regularly inebriated. Occurred an occurrence, the details of which are obscure, that led to the domestic worker being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a mental institution as a boy and lived there for his entire existence. Another endured deep despair and copied his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of overwhelming despair and what he called “weird seizures”. His work Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must frequently have pondered whether he was one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was striking, almost glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but good-looking. Even before he started wearing a dark cloak and headwear, he could command a room. But, maturing crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an small space – as an mature individual he desired privacy, retreating into quiet when in company, disappearing for individual journeys.
Existential Fears and Crisis of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, star gazers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the origin of species, were raising disturbing questions. If the story of existence had started eons before the emergence of the mankind, then how to believe that the world had been made for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely created for humanity, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The modern optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed spaces immensely huge and organisms infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s belief, considering such evidence, in a God who had created mankind in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then might the human race follow suit?
Persistent Motifs: Kraken and Bond
Holmes binds his narrative together with two persistent motifs. The primary he presents initially – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the 15-line sonnet presents themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something enormous, unutterable and sad, submerged inaccessible of human understanding, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of metre and as the originator of images in which awful enigma is packed into a few dazzlingly evocative phrases.
The second element is the contrast. Where the mythical sea monster symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is affectionate and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest lines with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a grateful note in verse portraying him in his rose garden with his tame doves perching all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s great celebration of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent nonsense of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “two owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a small bird” made their dwellings.
