The Boundless Deep: Exploring Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a torn spirit. He famously wrote a piece called The Two Voices, in which dual aspects of his personality debated the arguments of suicide. In this insightful book, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the overlooked persona of the writer.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 proved to be decisive for Tennyson. He published the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for almost two decades. Therefore, he became both celebrated and wealthy. He wed, following a long engagement. Before that, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or residing in solitude in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. At that point he acquired a house where he could receive notable guests. He assumed the role of the national poet. His career as a Great Man started.
From his teens he was striking, almost glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome
Lineage Challenges
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning susceptible to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a unwilling clergyman, was irate and regularly drunk. Occurred an incident, the facts of which are obscure, that led to the family cook being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a mental institution as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another experienced profound depression and emulated his father into addiction. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself experienced episodes of paralysing gloom and what he termed “strange episodes”. His Maud is narrated by a madman: he must frequently have wondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive. Prior to he adopted a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a space. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he sought out privacy, escaping into quiet when in groups, disappearing for individual journeys.
Philosophical Concerns and Upheaval of Faith
During his era, earth scientists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with Darwin about the evolution, were raising frightening inquiries. If the story of living beings had begun ages before the arrival of the human race, then how to maintain that the earth had been formed for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely made for mankind, who live on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The modern viewing devices and magnifying tools exposed realms vast beyond measure and beings minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s faith, in light of such findings, in a God who had created mankind in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then might the mankind follow suit?
Recurrent Themes: Sea Monster and Friendship
Holmes ties his story together with a pair of persistent motifs. The primary he introduces initially – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “ancient legends, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief poem establishes themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something vast, unspeakable and tragic, hidden out of reach of investigation, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of metre and as the creator of images in which dreadful unknown is packed into a few dazzlingly suggestive phrases.
The additional theme is the counterpart. Where the mythical beast epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is affectionate and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, wrote a appreciation message in verse describing him in his rose garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of delight excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant foolishness of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “two owls and a chicken, four larks and a wren” constructed their homes.
