Uncharted Depths: Examining Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a divided soul. He produced a piece named The Two Voices, where two versions of the poet contemplated the arguments of suicide. In this insightful work, the author elects to spotlight on the overlooked identity of the poet.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 became crucial for Alfred. He published the great poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had worked for close to a long period. Therefore, he became both famous and prosperous. He got married, following a long engagement. Before that, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or residing by himself in a rundown cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. At that point he moved into a home where he could entertain prominent guests. He assumed the role of the national poet. His career as a celebrated individual started.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, even charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Family Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating inclined to moods and sadness. His father, a reluctant minister, was angry and regularly drunk. Transpired an event, the facts of which are unclear, that led to the domestic worker being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and lived there for his entire existence. Another experienced profound melancholy and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself endured episodes of paralysing gloom and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is told by a lunatic: he must frequently have wondered whether he might turn into one personally.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, messy but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could dominate a space. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he craved isolation, retreating into stillness when in groups, vanishing for lonely journeys.
Existential Anxieties and Crisis of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, star gazers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the evolution, were posing appalling queries. If the history of living beings had begun millions of years before the arrival of the human race, then how to hold that the earth had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply created for mankind, who live on a minor world of a third-rate sun The recent telescopes and lenses revealed realms vast beyond measure and creatures minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s belief, considering such proof, in a divine being who had made humanity in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then could the humanity follow suit?
Repeating Themes: Sea Monster and Bond
The biographer binds his account together with dual recurrent motifs. The first he presents initially – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “ancient legends, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief sonnet establishes concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something immense, indescribable and mournful, concealed out of reach of human understanding, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a expert of verse and as the creator of metaphors in which dreadful mystery is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative phrases.
The additional element is the contrast. Where the imaginary beast represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, penned a appreciation message in verse portraying him in his rose garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, wrist and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an image of pleasure perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb nonsense of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a hen, multiple birds and a small bird” made their nests.