The Vast Unknown: Delving into Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a conflicted soul. He famously wrote a piece titled The Two Voices, wherein dual versions of the poet argued the pros and cons of suicide. Through this illuminating book, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the lesser known persona of the writer.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 became pivotal for the poet. He released the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for nearly two decades. As a result, he grew both famous and prosperous. He got married, subsequent to a extended engagement. Before that, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or residing in solitude in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Then he moved into a residence where he could host prominent callers. He became the national poet. His life as a renowned figure commenced.
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome
Family Challenges
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, suggesting inclined to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a hesitant priest, was volatile and very often inebriated. There was an incident, the facts of which are vague, that led to the household servant being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a lunatic asylum as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another experienced severe depression and copied his father into alcoholism. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of overwhelming gloom and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must frequently have wondered whether he was one himself.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but attractive. Before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a space. But, maturing in close quarters with his siblings – three brothers to an attic room – as an mature individual he desired privacy, withdrawing into stillness when in company, retreating for individual walking tours.
Deep Concerns and Crisis of Belief
In that period, earth scientists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the evolution, were posing appalling questions. If the story of existence had begun ages before the emergence of the humanity, then how to hold that the world had been made for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only made for us, who reside on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The modern optical instruments and lenses revealed spaces immensely huge and organisms infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s faith, given such proof, in a God who had formed man in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then would the mankind follow suit?
Repeating Themes: Kraken and Companionship
Holmes binds his story together with dual recurring themes. The primary he introduces initially – it is the concept of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young scholar when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “historical science, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the brief sonnet presents concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something vast, unspeakable and sad, submerged beyond reach of human inquiry, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of verse and as the author of metaphors in which terrible mystery is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative lines.
The other theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary creature epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive lines with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a thank-you letter in rhyme depicting him in his flower bed with his tame doves resting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, wrist and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an image of pleasure nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb foolishness of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, four larks and a wren” constructed their dwellings.
