The Boundless Deep: Examining Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a torn individual. He even composed a poem called The Two Voices, wherein contrasting aspects of himself argued the merits of suicide. Through this revealing book, the biographer elects to spotlight on the more obscure persona of the poet.
A Critical Year: 1850
During 1850 was crucial for Alfred. He unveiled the monumental verse series In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for nearly two decades. As a result, he emerged as both renowned and wealthy. He wed, following a 14‑year engagement. Previously, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or staying alone in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. At that point he took a home where he could receive notable callers. He became poet laureate. His existence as a Great Man commenced.
Even as a youth he was striking, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but handsome
Lineage Struggles
His family, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning susceptible to temperament and melancholy. His paternal figure, a unwilling clergyman, was volatile and frequently inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the facts of which are obscure, that caused the family cook being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a lunatic asylum as a boy and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another experienced profound melancholy and copied his father into addiction. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself endured periods of paralysing sadness and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His work Maud is told by a madman: he must regularly have pondered whether he might turn into one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but handsome. Before he adopted a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a gathering. But, having grown up crowded with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an attic room – as an adult he craved isolation, escaping into stillness when in groups, vanishing for solitary excursions.
Philosophical Concerns and Upheaval of Conviction
In that period, rock experts, astronomers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising disturbing inquiries. If the story of living beings had begun eons before the appearance of the human race, then how to believe that the planet had been made for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely made for mankind, who reside on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The modern optical instruments and lenses revealed spaces vast beyond measure and beings minutely tiny: how to keep one’s belief, in light of such evidence, in a divine being who had made humanity in his form? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then could the humanity follow suit?
Repeating Elements: Kraken and Friendship
The author ties his story together with two persistent elements. The initial he presents initially – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief poem establishes concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, hidden out of reach of human inquiry, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a master of metre and as the author of metaphors in which dreadful enigma is condensed into a few brilliantly evocative lines.
The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional creature represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his flower bed with his pet birds resting all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on back, hand and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb absurdity of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, multiple birds and a tiny creature” made their dwellings.
