Uncharted Depths: Examining Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a conflicted soul. He produced a poem named The Two Voices, in which dual facets of his personality contemplated the arguments of ending his life. Within this insightful work, the biographer decides to concentrate on the more obscure identity of the poet.
A Critical Year: 1850
During 1850 became pivotal for Alfred. He published the monumental verse series In Memoriam, on which he had worked for nearly twenty years. Therefore, he emerged as both celebrated and rich. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a extended engagement. Before that, he had been residing in leased properties with his family members, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or staying in solitude in a rundown dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate shores. At that point he acquired a home where he could host distinguished callers. He assumed the role of the official poet. His career as a Great Man started.
Even as a youth he was imposing, even charismatic. He was very tall, disheveled but good-looking
Lineage Challenges
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning inclined to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a hesitant priest, was volatile and frequently intoxicated. Transpired an incident, the particulars of which are unclear, that caused the domestic worker being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and lived there for the rest of his days. Another experienced severe despair and emulated his father into addiction. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of paralysing sadness and what he called “bizarre fits”. His Maud is told by a lunatic: he must often have pondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was striking, almost glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking. Before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could command a room. But, maturing crowded with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an small space – as an mature individual he sought out solitude, retreating into silence when in social settings, disappearing for solitary journeys.
Philosophical Anxieties and Turmoil of Belief
In that period, geologists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the evolution, were raising frightening queries. If the timeline of existence had commenced eons before the arrival of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only formed for us, who reside on a minor world of a common sun.” The recent viewing devices and microscopes exposed areas vast beyond measure and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s belief, given such findings, in a divine being who had made man in his form? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the human race do so too?
Persistent Elements: Kraken and Friendship
The author binds his account together with dual persistent motifs. The initial he establishes at the beginning – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line poem presents ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something enormous, unspeakable and tragic, concealed out of reach of human inquiry, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the creator of symbols in which awful mystery is compressed into a few strikingly suggestive phrases.
The additional theme is the contrast. Where the imaginary beast represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a appreciation message in rhyme describing him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on arm, wrist and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of delight perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s great praise of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent absurdity of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a hen, multiple birds and a tiny creature” built their nests.
