The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a torn soul. He famously wrote a poem called The Two Voices, wherein dual aspects of his personality argued the pros and cons of ending his life. Within this illuminating work, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the overlooked persona of the poet.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 proved to be decisive for the poet. He published the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had worked for almost two decades. Therefore, he grew both famous and prosperous. He got married, after a extended relationship. Before that, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Now he took a residence where he could entertain notable guests. He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a celebrated individual started.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive
Lineage Struggles
His family, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating prone to temperament and melancholy. His father, a unwilling clergyman, was irate and frequently drunk. Transpired an incident, the facts of which are obscure, that caused the family cook being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a mental institution as a child and remained there for life. Another experienced deep despair and followed his father into addiction. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself experienced bouts of debilitating gloom and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is told by a madman: he must regularly have questioned whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was striking, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome. Before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a gathering. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his siblings – multiple siblings to an small space – as an adult he sought out privacy, escaping into silence when in company, vanishing for individual walking tours.
Existential Fears and Crisis of Conviction
During his era, rock experts, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising frightening queries. If the timeline of living beings had begun ages before the appearance of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been created for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply formed for us, who inhabit a minor world of a third-rate sun The new optical instruments and lenses revealed areas vast beyond measure and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s religion, considering such evidence, in a deity who had created mankind in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then might the human race follow suit?
Repeating Elements: Sea Monster and Bond
The biographer weaves his story together with a pair of recurring themes. The initial he establishes early on – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line poem presents concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something immense, indescribable and sad, concealed inaccessible of investigation, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of verse and as the creator of metaphors in which awful enigma is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative words.
The other element is the counterpart. Where the imaginary sea monster represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is loving and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a appreciation message in poetry describing him in his garden with his pet birds perching all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on shoulder, wrist and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of pleasure nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s great celebration of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb foolishness of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a wren” built their dwellings.
