The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself was known as a conflicted individual. He even composed a piece titled The Two Voices, where contrasting facets of his personality contemplated the arguments of ending his life. In this illuminating volume, the author chooses to focus on the overlooked character of the writer.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 proved to be decisive for the poet. He unveiled the monumental verse series In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for close to twenty years. Therefore, he became both famous and rich. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a 14‑year courtship. Before that, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or staying in solitude in a ramshackle cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Then he took a house where he could entertain notable guests. He assumed the role of the official poet. His existence as a renowned figure began.
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but handsome
Ancestral Turmoil
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting prone to moods and sadness. His parent, a unwilling priest, was angry and very often inebriated. Occurred an event, the particulars of which are obscure, that resulted in the domestic worker being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a child and remained there for the rest of his days. Another endured deep depression and copied his father into drinking. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of debilitating gloom and what he called “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is voiced by a madman: he must regularly have questioned whether he could become one in his own right.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, disheveled but attractive. Prior to he adopted a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a gathering. But, having grown up in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an attic room – as an grown man he craved solitude, retreating into quiet when in company, vanishing for lonely journeys.
Philosophical Fears and Crisis of Conviction
During his era, geologists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the origin of species, were raising appalling inquiries. If the history of living beings had begun millions of years before the arrival of the human race, then how to hold that the world had been made for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely formed for us, who live on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The new viewing devices and lenses uncovered realms infinitely large and creatures infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s religion, given such proof, in a God who had made humanity in his form? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then might the humanity do so too?
Recurrent Themes: Mythical Beast and Companionship
Holmes weaves his account together with a pair of persistent elements. The first he establishes initially – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short poem presents ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something vast, unspeakable and tragic, hidden out of reach of human understanding, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the creator of symbols in which dreadful unknown is condensed into a few dazzlingly suggestive words.
The second element is the counterpart. Where the imaginary creature symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is loving and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic verses with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme portraying him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on arm, palm and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant absurdity of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the old man with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, four larks and a small bird” made their dwellings.
