The Vast Unknown: Delving into Young Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself existed as a conflicted spirit. He produced a poem called The Two Voices, where dual versions of the poet debated the merits of suicide. Within this revealing volume, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the lesser known character of the poet.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 proved to be pivotal for Tennyson. He released the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for almost twenty years. Therefore, he emerged as both celebrated and prosperous. He wed, subsequent to a 14‑year engagement. Previously, he had been living in leased properties with his relatives, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a rundown cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren shores. Now he took a home where he could host distinguished visitors. He became the national poet. His career as a Great Man began.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome
Ancestral Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating prone to temperament and melancholy. His paternal figure, a reluctant minister, was volatile and frequently inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the facts of which are obscure, that caused the household servant being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a lunatic asylum as a child and remained there for life. Another experienced profound melancholy and copied his father into alcoholism. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself experienced bouts of paralysing sadness and what he termed “weird seizures”. His work Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must frequently have pondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was commanding, even charismatic. He was very tall, messy but good-looking. Even before he adopted a dark cloak and sombrero, he could command a space. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his siblings – multiple siblings to an small space – as an adult he desired isolation, escaping into silence when in groups, vanishing for solitary walking tours.
Deep Concerns and Crisis of Conviction
During his era, geologists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the evolution, were introducing appalling queries. If the timeline of existence had begun millions of years before the emergence of the human race, then how to maintain that the world had been made for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely formed for humanity, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The modern telescopes and lenses uncovered areas infinitely large and beings minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s faith, in light of such proof, in a divine being who had made man in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then might the human race do so too?
Persistent Elements: Sea Monster and Companionship
Holmes weaves his story together with a pair of persistent themes. The initial he establishes initially – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “ancient legends, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the short poem establishes ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something enormous, unutterable and mournful, submerged out of reach of human inquiry, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of rhythm and as the author of metaphors in which awful mystery is compressed into a few dazzlingly suggestive words.
The other theme is the counterpart. Where the mythical sea monster represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is fond and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive verses with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a thank-you letter in verse describing him in his rose garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on arm, wrist and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent absurdity of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the old man with a facial hair in which “two owls and a fowl, several songbirds and a small bird” built their dwellings.
