The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself existed as a divided soul. He famously wrote a verse titled The Two Voices, wherein two versions of himself debated the pros and cons of suicide. Through this illuminating work, the author elects to spotlight on the lesser known identity of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: 1850
The year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Tennyson. He unveiled the great poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost twenty years. As a result, he emerged as both famous and wealthy. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a extended engagement. Previously, he had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or residing in solitude in a dilapidated house on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Then he took a home where he could entertain distinguished guests. He assumed the role of the official poet. His career as a celebrated individual commenced.
From his teens he was commanding, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking
Lineage Challenges
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning susceptible to moods and sadness. His father, a unwilling priest, was angry and very often inebriated. There was an incident, the facts of which are vague, that led to the household servant being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a mental institution as a youth and remained there for the rest of his days. Another experienced severe despair and copied his father into alcoholism. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of debilitating gloom and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have wondered whether he could become one in his own right.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was striking, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive. Before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a space. But, maturing crowded with his family members – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he desired solitude, escaping into stillness when in company, disappearing for individual excursions.
Philosophical Fears and Upheaval of Faith
In that period, geologists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the origin of species, were raising appalling inquiries. If the history of existence had begun eons before the emergence of the humanity, then how to hold that the planet had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply created for mankind, who inhabit a minor world of a third-rate sun The recent telescopes and magnifying tools uncovered spaces immensely huge and creatures infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s belief, in light of such findings, in a God who had formed mankind in his own image? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then would the human race meet the same fate?
Repeating Elements: Sea Monster and Bond
Holmes ties his story together with dual recurrent themes. The primary he introduces early on – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young student when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Norse mythology, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the brief verse presents concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something immense, indescribable and tragic, hidden inaccessible of human understanding, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a master of rhythm and as the author of metaphors in which dreadful mystery is packed into a few strikingly indicative words.
The second theme is the counterpart. Where the mythical beast symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is affectionate and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic verses with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a appreciation message in poetry describing him in his rose garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on shoulder, hand and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s significant praise of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant absurdity of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, several songbirds and a wren” constructed their dwellings.
