Uncharted Depths: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted individual. He even composed a poem named The Two Voices, in which dual facets of the poet argued the arguments of suicide. In this insightful book, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known persona of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
During 1850 was crucial for the poet. He published the great verse series In Memoriam, for which he had worked for close to two decades. Therefore, he grew both renowned and wealthy. He wed, after a 14‑year relationship. Previously, he had been living in leased properties with his relatives, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or staying in solitude in a ramshackle house on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren coasts. Now he took a home where he could receive distinguished callers. He assumed the role of the national poet. His existence as a Great Man started.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, even glamorous. He was very tall, disheveled but good-looking
Ancestral Struggles
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating prone to moods and melancholy. His paternal figure, a unwilling minister, was irate and very often intoxicated. There was an event, the facts of which are vague, that caused the domestic worker being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and lived there for life. Another suffered from severe melancholy and emulated his father into addiction. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself experienced periods of overwhelming sadness and what he called “weird seizures”. His Maud is voiced by a madman: he must frequently have pondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive. Even before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could control a room. But, having grown up crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an small space – as an adult he craved isolation, withdrawing into quiet when in social settings, disappearing for individual excursions.
Deep Fears and Upheaval of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were raising appalling questions. If the history of existence had commenced ages before the arrival of the human race, then how to maintain that the planet had been created for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply created for mankind, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The modern viewing devices and lenses uncovered areas immensely huge and beings tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s belief, given such findings, in a deity who had created humanity in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then might the mankind do so too?
Persistent Themes: Mythical Beast and Companionship
Holmes binds his story together with two recurrent elements. The initial he presents initially – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line verse introduces ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something enormous, unutterable and tragic, hidden inaccessible of human understanding, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a expert of rhythm and as the originator of symbols in which awful mystery is packed into a few dazzlingly evocative lines.
The other theme is the contrast. Where the mythical creature represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, conjures all that is affectionate and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic verses with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, penned a thank-you letter in poetry describing him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on arm, palm and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent foolishness of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy 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, four larks and a tiny creature” made their dwellings.
