The Boundless Deep: Examining Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a conflicted individual. He even composed a verse called The Two Voices, in which dual facets of himself contemplated the merits of self-destruction. In this insightful volume, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the more obscure character of the writer.
A Defining Year: 1850
During 1850 became decisive for Alfred. He published the great verse series In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for close to twenty years. Consequently, he grew both famous and prosperous. He got married, after a long courtship. Earlier, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or staying alone in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Then he moved into a house where he could entertain distinguished guests. He became the national poet. His career as a renowned figure started.
From his teens he was striking, even glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome
Lineage Challenges
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting inclined to moods and depression. His parent, a reluctant minister, was angry and regularly inebriated. There was an event, the details of which are unclear, that caused the domestic worker being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a mental institution as a boy and lived there for his entire existence. Another experienced deep despair and followed his father into drinking. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from periods of debilitating despair and what he called “weird seizures”. His work Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must regularly have wondered whether he might turn into one personally.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, messy but attractive. Even before he adopted a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a space. But, having grown up crowded with his siblings – multiple siblings to an small space – as an grown man he sought out privacy, escaping into quiet when in groups, disappearing for lonely excursions.
Deep Concerns and Upheaval of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, celestial observers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the evolution, were posing frightening inquiries. If the history of existence had begun millions of years before the arrival of the mankind, then how to believe that the planet had been made for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was only made for us, who live on a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The recent telescopes and magnifying tools exposed realms infinitely large and creatures infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s belief, in light of such evidence, in a deity who had created humanity in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then could the human race follow suit?
Persistent Themes: Sea Monster and Companionship
The author binds his story together with a pair of recurring themes. The initial he introduces initially – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief sonnet introduces themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something enormous, indescribable and mournful, concealed out of reach of investigation, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of verse and as the creator of metaphors in which awful enigma is packed into a few brilliantly evocative lines.
The second motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional beast represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and playful in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a grateful note in rhyme describing him in his flower bed with his pet birds perching all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, hand and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of joy nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant absurdity of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a beard in which “two owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a small bird” constructed their dwellings.
