The Vast Unknown: Delving into Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a divided spirit. He famously wrote a verse called The Two Voices, in which two facets of himself debated the merits of suicide. Through this illuminating volume, the biographer chooses to focus on the lesser known persona of the writer.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 was crucial for Tennyson. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for almost two decades. Therefore, he emerged as both renowned and rich. He entered matrimony, after a long relationship. Before that, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his family members, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or residing in solitude in a dilapidated house on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Then he took a residence where he could receive distinguished guests. He became poet laureate. His existence as a renowned figure commenced.
From his teens he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but handsome
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating prone to moods and sadness. His father, a unwilling minister, was volatile and regularly drunk. Transpired an occurrence, the particulars of which are vague, that caused the family cook being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and lived there for life. Another experienced severe melancholy and copied his father into addiction. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself experienced periods of overwhelming despair and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must often have questioned whether he might turn into one personally.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive. Even before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could command a gathering. But, being raised in close quarters with his siblings – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an adult he desired privacy, escaping into stillness when in company, retreating for individual walking tours.
Existential Concerns and Crisis of Belief
In that period, geologists, star gazers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were introducing frightening queries. If the story of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the arrival of the mankind, then how to believe that the earth had been made for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only created for mankind, who live on a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The modern optical instruments and magnifying tools revealed areas infinitely large and creatures infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s religion, considering such proof, in a deity who had created mankind in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then would the humanity meet the same fate?
Persistent Themes: Mythical Beast and Friendship
The author weaves his story together with dual recurrent motifs. The primary he introduces initially – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful student when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the short verse establishes ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of verse and as the author of metaphors in which terrible enigma is compressed into a few strikingly indicative lines.
The other element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary creature epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is loving and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a appreciation message in rhyme describing him in his garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on back, palm and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of joy excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant absurdity of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, multiple birds and a wren” made their nests.
