The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself existed as a divided individual. He even composed a piece titled The Two Voices, wherein contrasting facets of his personality contemplated the merits of self-destruction. In this insightful book, the author elects to spotlight on the overlooked persona of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
During 1850 was crucial for Alfred. He published the great verse series In Memoriam, over which he had worked for close to twenty years. As a result, he became both renowned and prosperous. He got married, subsequent to a 14‑year relationship. Previously, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or staying alone in a dilapidated cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. At that point he acquired a house where he could entertain notable callers. He was appointed the official poet. His career as a Great Man started.
Even as a youth he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating inclined to emotional swings and depression. His parent, a unwilling minister, was irate and very often drunk. Transpired an event, the details of which are obscure, that caused the family cook being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a mental institution as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from deep despair and emulated his father into drinking. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself endured bouts of debilitating gloom and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must frequently have wondered whether he could become one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome. Before he adopted a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an adult he craved privacy, withdrawing into silence when in groups, retreating for lonely walking tours.
Philosophical Anxieties and Upheaval of Conviction
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with Darwin about the evolution, were posing frightening queries. If the history of life on Earth had commenced eons before the arrival of the humanity, then how to hold that the earth had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply created for us, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The new telescopes and lenses exposed realms immensely huge and beings tiny beyond perception: how to maintain one’s faith, given such findings, in a divine being who had made mankind in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then would the mankind meet the same fate?
Repeating Motifs: Kraken and Friendship
The author binds his account together with a pair of recurrent themes. The initial he introduces early on – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the brief poem presents ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something enormous, indescribable and sad, concealed beyond reach of investigation, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the originator of metaphors in which terrible mystery is packed into a few dazzlingly suggestive lines.
The other theme is the counterpart. Where the imaginary beast epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is fond and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest lines with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme portraying him in his rose garden with his pet birds resting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on arm, hand and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great praise of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant foolishness of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, four larks and a tiny creature” built their nests.
