The Boundless Deep: Delving into Young Tennyson's Restless Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a conflicted individual. He produced a verse called The Two Voices, where dual facets of himself debated the arguments of self-destruction. Within this illuminating book, the biographer chooses to focus on the more obscure character of the writer.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 was decisive for Tennyson. He released the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for close to two decades. Therefore, he became both celebrated and rich. He got married, following a 14‑year courtship. Before that, he had been living in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or staying in solitude in a ramshackle cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren coasts. Then he acquired a residence where he could receive prominent callers. He assumed the role of the national poet. His career as a celebrated individual started.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Lineage Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning inclined to moods and sadness. His paternal figure, a unwilling clergyman, was angry and frequently intoxicated. Occurred an event, the particulars of which are obscure, that led to the household servant being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a lunatic asylum as a boy and remained there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from profound despair and copied his father into addiction. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of paralysing despair and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must regularly have pondered whether he could become one personally.
The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking. Prior to he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could control a gathering. But, having grown up in close quarters with his family members – several relatives to an attic room – as an grown man he sought out isolation, escaping into silence when in social settings, vanishing for individual walking tours.
Existential Fears and Turmoil of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the origin of species, were posing appalling inquiries. If the history of life on Earth had started ages before the appearance of the humanity, then how to hold that the earth had been made for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely made for us, who reside on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The modern viewing devices and microscopes revealed spaces immensely huge and beings infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s religion, given such evidence, in a divine being who had made humanity in his form? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then might the mankind follow suit?
Recurrent Themes: Mythical Beast and Bond
Holmes ties his story together with dual persistent motifs. The first he introduces initially – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “ancient legends, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief verse presents concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something enormous, unspeakable and mournful, concealed beyond reach of human inquiry, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a master of verse and as the creator of symbols in which awful enigma is packed into a few brilliantly evocative lines.
The additional motif is the counterpart. Where the fictional sea monster epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is loving and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, composed a thank-you letter in verse depicting him in his garden with his tame doves perching all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on back, palm and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of delight excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s notable praise of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant nonsense of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a small bird” constructed their nests.
