The Vast Unknown: Delving into Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a divided individual. He famously wrote a piece titled The Two Voices, wherein dual facets of the poet argued the merits of suicide. Within this insightful work, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the overlooked identity of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 was crucial for Tennyson. He released the great verse series In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for close to a long period. Consequently, he emerged as both renowned and rich. He wed, subsequent to a extended engagement. Before that, he had been residing in rented homes with his family members, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or residing in solitude in a ramshackle house on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Then he took a house where he could entertain notable guests. He became the national poet. His life as a Great Man commenced.
Even as a youth he was striking, even charismatic. He was very tall, messy but good-looking
Ancestral Turmoil
His family, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting prone to moods and melancholy. His paternal figure, a reluctant clergyman, was volatile and frequently drunk. Occurred an event, the particulars of which are obscure, that resulted in the household servant being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a mental institution as a child and lived there for life. Another endured deep melancholy and emulated his father into addiction. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of debilitating sadness and what he termed “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must regularly have pondered whether he could become one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was commanding, even glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a dark cloak and headwear, he could command a gathering. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his family members – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an mature individual he craved isolation, withdrawing into silence when in company, disappearing for lonely walking tours.
Deep Fears and Turmoil of Belief
In that period, rock experts, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the evolution, were posing disturbing inquiries. If the story of existence had commenced eons before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been made for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only made for humanity, who live on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The recent optical instruments and microscopes revealed areas infinitely large and creatures infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s faith, considering such evidence, in a divine being who had made man in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then could the humanity do so too?
Repeating Motifs: Kraken and Bond
The author weaves his account together with two recurrent elements. The initial he establishes early on – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful student when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line verse presents themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something enormous, unspeakable and tragic, hidden beyond reach of human understanding, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a master of rhythm and as the creator of metaphors in which dreadful enigma is condensed into a few dazzlingly suggestive lines.
The other element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary beast symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a grateful note in rhyme portraying him in his rose garden with his pet birds resting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on arm, wrist and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of pleasure nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s notable praise of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb foolishness of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “two owls and a hen, four larks and a tiny creature” constructed their homes.
