The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself existed as a conflicted spirit. He produced a piece called The Two Voices, in which two facets of himself debated the merits of ending his life. Within this insightful volume, the biographer chooses to focus on the more obscure character of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
The year 1850 was crucial for the poet. He published the significant verse series In Memoriam, over which he had worked for almost a long period. As a result, he grew both celebrated and rich. He got married, after a long engagement. Previously, he had been residing in leased properties with his family members, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or staying in solitude in a rundown dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Then he took a home where he could host distinguished guests. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His existence as a renowned figure commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was striking, almost magnetic. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome
Family Challenges
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating susceptible to emotional swings and melancholy. His paternal figure, a unwilling clergyman, was irate and regularly inebriated. Occurred an incident, the facts of which are unclear, that led to the household servant being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a mental institution as a boy and lived there for life. Another suffered from profound despair and copied his father into drinking. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself experienced bouts of overwhelming sadness and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His work Maud is narrated by a madman: he must regularly have pondered whether he was one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, messy but handsome. Even before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could control a gathering. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an grown man he craved isolation, retreating into quiet when in company, vanishing for individual walking tours.
Philosophical Anxieties and Upheaval of Belief
In that period, geologists, astronomers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing appalling inquiries. If the timeline of existence had started eons before the emergence of the mankind, then how to believe that the planet had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely created for us, who reside on a minor world of a ordinary star The new viewing devices and magnifying tools exposed realms vast beyond measure and beings minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s belief, given such evidence, in a divine being who had formed mankind in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then would the human race do so too?
Repeating Themes: Mythical Beast and Companionship
The biographer weaves his story together with two recurring themes. The primary he presents early on – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young student when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line poem establishes concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something enormous, unutterable and tragic, submerged out of reach of investigation, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of rhythm and as the author of images in which terrible enigma is packed into a few brilliantly indicative lines.
The second theme is the contrast. Where the fictional sea monster epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive verses with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in poetry depicting him in his garden with his tame doves perching all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, hand and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an image of delight nicely suited to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb absurdity of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “two owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a small bird” constructed their homes.
