The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Restless Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a divided soul. He famously wrote a verse called The Two Voices, where two facets of his personality argued the arguments of self-destruction. Through this insightful book, the author elects to spotlight on the overlooked character of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: 1850
The year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Alfred. He released the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for almost twenty years. As a result, he became both famous and rich. He wed, following a extended engagement. Before that, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his relatives, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or residing in solitude in a ramshackle house on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Now he took a home where he could entertain notable visitors. He became poet laureate. His existence as a Great Man began.
From his teens he was commanding, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome
Family Struggles
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating inclined to moods and depression. His paternal figure, a reluctant clergyman, was volatile and very often drunk. Occurred an event, the details of which are vague, that caused the domestic worker being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a mental institution as a youth and lived there for his entire existence. Another experienced severe melancholy and copied his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself endured periods of overwhelming sadness and what he called “weird seizures”. His Maud is told by a madman: he must frequently have questioned whether he might turn into one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive. Prior to he adopted a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could command a gathering. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his family members – three brothers to an small space – as an adult he sought out privacy, withdrawing into stillness when in company, retreating for lonely journeys.
Existential Concerns and Crisis of Conviction
In that period, geologists, star gazers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with Darwin about the evolution, were posing disturbing questions. If the history of living beings had begun eons before the emergence of the human race, then how to hold that the planet had been made for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply made for mankind, who reside on a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The modern optical instruments and microscopes revealed realms vast beyond measure and organisms infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s religion, in light of such findings, in a deity who had made humanity in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then might the humanity do so too?
Persistent Motifs: Kraken and Bond
The biographer weaves his story together with a pair of persistent elements. The initial he establishes initially – it is the symbol 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 “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief poem introduces concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something vast, unutterable and sad, concealed beyond reach of human inquiry, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a master of verse and as the originator of symbols in which terrible unknown is condensed into a few dazzlingly suggestive words.
The second theme is the counterpart. Where the fictional beast symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is loving and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, composed a thank-you letter in rhyme depicting him in his garden with his tame doves resting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of pleasure nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent foolishness of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the old man with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, multiple birds and a tiny creature” made their homes.
