Uncharted Depths: Delving into Young Tennyson's Restless Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a conflicted soul. He produced a piece named The Two Voices, wherein two facets of the poet debated the arguments of suicide. Through this illuminating volume, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known character of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 proved to be decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the great verse series In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for close to a long period. Therefore, he became both celebrated and wealthy. He entered matrimony, following a 14‑year engagement. Earlier, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or staying alone in a rundown cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Then he acquired a residence where he could receive prominent callers. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His existence as a Great Man commenced.
Even as a youth he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was of great height, messy but handsome
Family Challenges
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating prone to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a reluctant clergyman, was angry and frequently intoxicated. Occurred an incident, the particulars of which are unclear, that caused the household servant being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a boy and lived there for his entire existence. Another experienced deep despair and copied his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of overwhelming despair and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His work Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must frequently have wondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome. Even before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a space. But, being raised crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an small space – as an adult he craved privacy, escaping into quiet when in company, retreating for lonely excursions.
Deep Concerns and Turmoil of Belief
In that period, earth scientists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing appalling inquiries. If the timeline of living beings had begun millions of years before the arrival of the human race, then how to hold that the planet had been made for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely formed for us, who reside on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The new viewing devices and lenses revealed areas vast beyond measure and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s religion, in light of such findings, in a divine being who had made mankind in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then could the humanity follow suit?
Persistent Themes: Kraken and Bond
Holmes ties his account together with dual persistent themes. The primary he introduces early on – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line sonnet establishes ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something enormous, indescribable and mournful, concealed out of reach of investigation, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a master of verse and as the originator of images in which terrible enigma is packed into a few dazzlingly indicative lines.
The second motif is the contrast. Where the fictional creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a grateful note in rhyme describing him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, palm and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of pleasure excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant absurdity of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a wren” made their dwellings.