The Boundless Deep: Examining Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a torn individual. He even composed a verse called The Two Voices, wherein dual versions of himself argued the pros and cons of suicide. Within this revealing volume, the biographer elects to spotlight on the lesser known identity of the poet.
A Defining Year: 1850
During 1850 was decisive for the poet. He published the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for close to two decades. Consequently, he grew both renowned and wealthy. He got married, following a 14‑year engagement. Previously, he had been residing in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or residing in solitude in a rundown cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate shores. At that point he moved into a house where he could receive notable callers. He was appointed the official poet. His life as a celebrated individual started.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive
Ancestral Challenges
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning susceptible to temperament and melancholy. His parent, a unwilling minister, was irate and very often intoxicated. Occurred an occurrence, the details of which are vague, that resulted in the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a mental institution as a child and lived there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from severe depression and copied his father into drinking. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself experienced bouts of debilitating gloom and what he called “bizarre fits”. His Maud is told by a madman: he must often have pondered whether he could become one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was striking, even magnetic. He was very tall, messy but attractive. Prior to he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a gathering. But, being raised in close quarters with his family members – several relatives to an attic room – as an mature individual he desired privacy, retreating into stillness when in groups, vanishing for lonely journeys.
Existential Concerns and Crisis of Faith
During his era, rock experts, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were raising frightening questions. If the story of living beings had commenced ages before the arrival of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been created for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely created for mankind, who inhabit a minor world of a third-rate sun The new viewing devices and microscopes uncovered realms infinitely large and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s belief, given such findings, in a God who had formed man in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then could the mankind do so too?
Repeating Motifs: Mythical Beast and Bond
Holmes binds his story together with dual recurring elements. The initial he presents early on – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “ancient legends, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line verse introduces concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something immense, indescribable and tragic, concealed inaccessible of human inquiry, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of rhythm and as the author of images in which dreadful unknown is condensed into a few strikingly indicative lines.
The other motif is the contrast. Where the imaginary sea monster epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is affectionate and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest verses with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, composed a thank-you letter in rhyme portraying him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of delight nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s great celebration of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant foolishness of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “two owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a small bird” built their homes.
