The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Restless Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a torn spirit. He produced a poem named The Two Voices, where dual versions of himself debated the pros and cons of ending his life. Within this insightful volume, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the lesser known character of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: 1850
In the year 1850 proved to be crucial for Tennyson. He published the monumental verse series In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for almost twenty years. Consequently, he grew both celebrated and prosperous. He entered matrimony, after a long courtship. Earlier, he had been residing in rented homes with his relatives, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or living in solitude in a dilapidated cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Now he moved into a home where he could host distinguished guests. He became the national poet. His career as a renowned figure started.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome
Ancestral Turmoil
His family, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting inclined to temperament and depression. His parent, a hesitant priest, was angry and very often inebriated. Transpired an incident, the facts of which are vague, that led to the family cook being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a lunatic asylum as a child and remained there for life. Another endured severe melancholy and copied his father into alcoholism. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself endured episodes of overwhelming despair and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have pondered whether he could become one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome. Before he began to wear a dark cloak and headwear, he could control a gathering. But, having grown up in close quarters with his siblings – several relatives to an attic room – as an mature individual he craved isolation, retreating into quiet when in groups, disappearing for solitary excursions.
Existential Fears and Turmoil of Belief
During his era, geologists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were raising disturbing queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had started ages before the arrival of the mankind, then how to maintain that the earth had been created for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only formed for humanity, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The modern optical instruments and microscopes revealed areas infinitely large and creatures minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s belief, in light of such proof, in a divine being who had formed man in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then could the humanity meet the same fate?
Persistent Themes: Mythical Beast and Friendship
The author binds his account together with two recurring elements. The primary he establishes early on – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief verse establishes concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something immense, indescribable and tragic, hidden out of reach of investigation, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of metre and as the creator of images in which terrible mystery is condensed into a few brilliantly evocative phrases.
The additional motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional sea monster represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is fond and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a thank-you letter in poetry describing him in his flower bed with his pet birds resting all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on arm, hand and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of joy nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s notable praise of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant foolishness of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a beard in which “two owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a tiny creature” built their homes.
