The Vast Unknown: Exploring Young Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself was known as a torn soul. He even composed a piece titled The Two Voices, wherein two versions of the poet argued the pros and cons of self-destruction. In this insightful work, the author elects to spotlight on the more obscure character of the writer.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 was decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the great verse series In Memoriam, over which he had worked for close to twenty years. Therefore, he became both celebrated and prosperous. He got married, after a long relationship. Earlier, he had been residing in leased properties with his relatives, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or living alone in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Now he took a house where he could host prominent visitors. He was appointed the official poet. His life as a celebrated individual commenced.
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking
Family Struggles
His family, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning inclined to emotional swings and sadness. His parent, a reluctant minister, was volatile and regularly inebriated. Transpired an incident, the facts of which are unclear, that caused the family cook being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and stayed there for life. Another endured deep melancholy and followed his father into addiction. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself endured bouts of debilitating sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His Maud is told by a madman: he must regularly have wondered whether he could become one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
Even as a youth he was striking, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome. Even before he began to wear a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a gathering. But, maturing crowded with his family members – several relatives to an small space – as an mature individual he sought out privacy, withdrawing into quiet when in groups, retreating for individual walking tours.
Philosophical Anxieties and Upheaval of Faith
During his era, earth scientists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were raising appalling questions. If the story of living beings had commenced eons before the emergence of the mankind, then how to hold that the planet had been created for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely created for us, who inhabit a minor world of a ordinary star The recent optical instruments and microscopes uncovered areas vast beyond measure and creatures minutely tiny: how to keep one’s religion, in light of such proof, in a God who had formed humanity in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then could the humanity meet the same fate?
Repeating Motifs: Sea Monster and Bond
The biographer ties his story together with a pair of recurring motifs. The initial he establishes early on – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “ancient legends, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line sonnet introduces ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something immense, indescribable and tragic, concealed out of reach of human understanding, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a master of metre and as the author of metaphors in which dreadful mystery is compressed into a few strikingly evocative phrases.
The additional element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional beast represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a grateful note in verse portraying him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on back, hand and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb foolishness of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, several songbirds and a tiny creature” constructed their dwellings.
