The Vast Unknown: Examining Young Tennyson's Restless Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a torn soul. He famously wrote a poem named The Two Voices, wherein two aspects of the poet debated the pros and cons of ending his life. Through this insightful book, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the lesser known persona of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 was pivotal for Alfred. He unveiled the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for nearly twenty years. As a result, he emerged as both famous and rich. He got married, after a 14‑year engagement. Before that, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or residing alone in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. At that point he took a home where he could host notable visitors. He was appointed the national poet. His existence as a renowned figure started.
Even as a youth he was striking, almost magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive
Lineage Challenges
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning susceptible to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a unwilling priest, was volatile and frequently inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the details of which are obscure, that led to the family cook being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a mental institution as a boy and remained there for his entire existence. Another experienced severe depression and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself endured periods of overwhelming sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His Maud is told by a lunatic: he must regularly have wondered whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive. Before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could command a gathering. But, being raised in close quarters with his siblings – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an grown man he sought out isolation, retreating into silence when in social settings, retreating for lonely excursions.
Deep Anxieties and Upheaval of Belief
In that period, earth scientists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were raising disturbing questions. If the history of existence had begun eons before the appearance of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been made for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply formed for humanity, who live on a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The recent optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed spaces immensely huge and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s religion, given such findings, in a deity who had made humanity in his form? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then would the human race follow suit?
Recurrent Motifs: Mythical Beast and Companionship
The biographer weaves his narrative together with a pair of persistent themes. The primary he presents initially – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief poem presents themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something enormous, indescribable and mournful, hidden inaccessible of investigation, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a master of rhythm and as the author of symbols in which dreadful unknown is packed into a few strikingly indicative phrases.
The other theme is the contrast. Where the fictional sea monster represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, conjures all that is fond and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a grateful note in rhyme describing him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on back, palm and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent nonsense of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a hen, several songbirds and a wren” built their dwellings.
