The Boundless Deep: Delving into Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a divided soul. He produced a piece named The Two Voices, in which two aspects of his personality debated the pros and cons of suicide. In this revealing book, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the overlooked character of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: 1850
In the year 1850 became pivotal for the poet. He released the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for close to two decades. Therefore, he became both renowned and rich. He entered matrimony, after a 14‑year engagement. Earlier, he had been living in leased properties with his relatives, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or staying by himself in a ramshackle house on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Now he moved into a home where he could receive notable guests. He was appointed the national poet. His career as a renowned figure commenced.
Even as a youth he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but handsome
Lineage Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating prone to emotional swings and melancholy. His parent, a unwilling clergyman, was volatile and regularly drunk. Occurred an incident, the facts of which are vague, that resulted in the domestic worker being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a lunatic asylum as a boy and lived there for his entire existence. Another suffered from severe despair and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself endured periods of debilitating sadness and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His work Maud is narrated by a madman: he must regularly have wondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive. Even before he began to wear a dark cloak and headwear, he could control a gathering. But, having grown up in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an small space – as an adult he craved privacy, retreating into stillness when in groups, disappearing for individual excursions.
Philosophical Concerns and Crisis of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising disturbing inquiries. If the history of living beings had begun ages before the emergence of the human race, then how to believe that the planet had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely created for mankind, who live on a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The recent optical instruments and magnifying tools uncovered spaces vast beyond measure and beings minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s religion, given such evidence, in a deity who had made humanity in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then might the mankind do so too?
Recurrent Motifs: Sea Monster and Companionship
Holmes ties his story together with dual recurring elements. The first he presents initially – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he penned 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 short sonnet presents themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something vast, unutterable and mournful, concealed out of reach of human understanding, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a master of rhythm and as the creator of images in which awful unknown is packed into a few strikingly evocative lines.
The other theme is the counterpart. Where the mythical beast symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is loving and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive verses with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a grateful note in rhyme depicting him in his rose garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on back, palm and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s notable praise of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent foolishness of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the old man with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a small bird” made their homes.
