Uncharted Depths: Delving into Young Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself was known as a torn spirit. He famously wrote a poem named The Two Voices, in which dual versions of himself argued the merits of self-destruction. Within this revealing volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the overlooked identity of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: 1850
In the year 1850 became pivotal for the poet. He unveiled the monumental verse series In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for close to a long period. Consequently, he became both celebrated and wealthy. He wed, after a long relationship. Before that, he had been living in rented homes with his family members, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or living alone in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Then he moved into a residence where he could receive notable visitors. He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a Great Man began.
Even as a youth he was commanding, even charismatic. He was of great height, messy but good-looking
Lineage Challenges
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning prone to temperament and melancholy. His paternal figure, a reluctant priest, was volatile and regularly drunk. Occurred an incident, the details of which are unclear, that led to the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and lived there for life. Another suffered from severe despair and copied his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of overwhelming gloom and what he termed “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must regularly have pondered whether he could become one in his own right.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but handsome. Prior to he adopted a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could dominate a space. But, maturing crowded with his family members – several relatives to an small space – as an adult he desired privacy, retreating into stillness when in groups, retreating for individual journeys.
Deep Anxieties and Turmoil of Conviction
During his era, earth scientists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing frightening questions. If the history of life on Earth had started ages before the emergence of the mankind, then how to believe that the world had been formed for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely made for us, who reside on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The modern telescopes and microscopes revealed areas vast beyond measure and beings tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s religion, in light of such proof, in a deity who had formed man in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then would the humanity follow suit?
Repeating Motifs: Mythical Beast and Friendship
Holmes ties his narrative together with a pair of recurring elements. The initial he presents at the beginning – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the 15-line sonnet establishes ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something immense, unutterable and tragic, concealed out of reach of human inquiry, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of metre and as the author of metaphors in which awful enigma is compressed into a few dazzlingly evocative lines.
The additional motif is the counterpart. Where the imaginary sea monster epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a grateful note in rhyme portraying him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on arm, wrist and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent foolishness of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a hen, four larks and a small bird” constructed their homes.
