Uncharted Depths: Exploring Young Tennyson's Restless Years

The poet Tennyson emerged as a conflicted spirit. He produced a poem called The Two Voices, in which dual versions of the poet debated the arguments of ending his life. Through this illuminating book, the author elects to spotlight on the lesser known persona of the literary figure.

A Defining Year: The Mid-Century

The year 1850 became pivotal for the poet. He unveiled the significant verse series In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for almost a long period. Consequently, he became both celebrated and rich. He entered matrimony, after a long relationship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his relatives, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or living alone in a ramshackle cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Now he acquired a residence where he could entertain prominent callers. He was appointed the official poet. His career as a renowned figure began.

Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive

Family Turmoil

The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting susceptible to temperament and melancholy. His parent, a hesitant clergyman, was angry and regularly intoxicated. Transpired an incident, the particulars of which are obscure, that led to the family cook being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a youth and remained there for life. Another endured severe melancholy and followed his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself endured periods of debilitating gloom and what he termed “weird seizures”. His work Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must often have wondered whether he could become one himself.

The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson

Even as a youth he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could command a room. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his siblings – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he sought out privacy, withdrawing into stillness when in company, retreating for individual journeys.

Philosophical Fears and Turmoil of Faith

In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, celestial observers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing appalling questions. If the timeline of living beings had begun eons before the appearance of the mankind, then how to hold that the planet had been made for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was only made for humanity, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The modern viewing devices and microscopes exposed areas immensely huge and organisms tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s faith, in light of such findings, in a God who had formed humanity in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then might the human race meet the same fate?

Repeating Motifs: Kraken and Friendship

Holmes weaves his narrative together with a pair of recurrent themes. The first he establishes early on – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “ancient legends, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line verse establishes ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something immense, unspeakable and sad, concealed beyond reach of human inquiry, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of verse and as the author of metaphors in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative lines.

The additional motif is the counterpart. Where the imaginary beast represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, wrote a grateful note in poetry depicting him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on shoulder, wrist and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of pleasure perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent absurdity of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the old man with a facial hair in which “two owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a wren” built their dwellings.

A Fascinating {Biography|Life Story|