The Boundless Deep: Delving into Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted individual. He produced a poem titled The Two Voices, wherein contrasting versions of his personality argued the pros and cons of self-destruction. In this revealing volume, the author chooses to focus on the overlooked persona of the literary figure.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
The year 1850 was crucial for Tennyson. He published the great verse series In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for close to twenty years. Therefore, he grew both renowned and prosperous. He wed, after a long engagement. Before that, he had been living in rented homes with his relatives, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a dilapidated cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren coasts. Then he took a house where he could entertain prominent visitors. He became poet laureate. His career as a celebrated individual began.
From his teens he was striking, even glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting prone to moods and melancholy. His paternal figure, a reluctant priest, was irate and frequently drunk. There was an event, the facts of which are obscure, that led to the household servant being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a mental institution as a youth and stayed there for his entire existence. Another endured deep despair and emulated his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to opium. Alfred himself experienced episodes of debilitating gloom and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have wondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could command a room. But, having grown up in close quarters with his family members – three brothers to an small space – as an grown man he desired solitude, withdrawing into stillness when in social settings, vanishing for lonely walking tours.
Existential Concerns and Crisis of Belief
During his era, geologists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the evolution, were introducing appalling inquiries. If the history of living beings had begun millions of years before the arrival of the human race, then how to maintain that the earth had been formed for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply formed for mankind, who reside on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The modern viewing devices and microscopes revealed realms infinitely large and creatures minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s belief, in light of such proof, in a divine being who had created man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then might the mankind meet the same fate?
Recurrent Motifs: Sea Monster and Bond
Holmes binds his account together with dual recurrent motifs. The first he presents early on – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young scholar when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the short verse establishes concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something enormous, unspeakable and sad, hidden inaccessible of human understanding, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the author of metaphors in which dreadful mystery is compressed into a few strikingly indicative lines.
The second motif is the contrast. Where the imaginary sea monster symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is loving and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, penned a grateful note in rhyme portraying him in his garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, hand and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of pleasure excellently suited to FitzGerald’s notable praise of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent nonsense of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, four larks and a tiny creature” made their homes.