The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself was known as a divided individual. He produced a verse titled The Two Voices, where two versions of the poet contemplated the merits of ending his life. In this insightful work, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the more obscure persona of the writer.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 was crucial for Tennyson. He unveiled the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had worked for nearly a long period. As a result, he became both renowned and wealthy. He wed, subsequent to a extended relationship. Before that, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or living alone in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. Then he took a residence where he could entertain prominent visitors. He was appointed the official poet. His existence as a Great Man started.
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, disheveled but attractive
Ancestral Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting prone to temperament and melancholy. His parent, a unwilling priest, was volatile and frequently intoxicated. There was an event, the facts of which are unclear, that caused the household servant being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a mental institution as a boy and lived there for the rest of his days. Another experienced deep depression and emulated his father into drinking. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself endured bouts of overwhelming sadness and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is narrated by a madman: he must frequently have questioned whether he might turn into one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, even charismatic. He was very tall, messy but attractive. Prior to he adopted a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a gathering. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his family members – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he craved solitude, escaping into quiet when in company, vanishing for lonely excursions.
Philosophical Concerns and Turmoil of Faith
During his era, earth scientists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Darwin about the evolution, were introducing disturbing queries. If the history of living beings had begun millions of years before the emergence of the human race, then how to maintain that the earth had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply created for humanity, who live on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The modern telescopes and microscopes exposed spaces vast beyond measure and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s religion, in light of such proof, in a divine being who had created man in his form? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then might the mankind do so too?
Recurrent Themes: Sea Monster and Companionship
The biographer binds his narrative together with two recurring motifs. The primary he presents at the beginning – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the short sonnet introduces ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something immense, indescribable and mournful, concealed beyond reach of human understanding, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a expert of verse and as the author of images in which terrible unknown is packed into a few dazzlingly evocative words.
The additional element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary sea monster symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic lines with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a grateful note in verse depicting him in his rose garden with his pet birds perching all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, wrist and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of joy perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s great celebration of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant absurdity of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a hen, four larks and a wren” built their homes.