The Vast Unknown: Examining Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself was known as a divided spirit. He produced a piece called The Two Voices, in which two facets of his personality argued the merits of self-destruction. Within this illuminating volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the more obscure identity of the writer.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
During 1850 was decisive for Tennyson. He released the significant verse series In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for close to two decades. As a result, he became both famous and prosperous. He got married, after a extended relationship. Before that, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or living by himself in a dilapidated house on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. At that point he moved into a house where he could entertain distinguished visitors. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating prone to emotional swings and depression. His parent, a reluctant priest, was irate and regularly inebriated. Transpired an event, the facts of which are unclear, that caused the family cook being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a boy and remained there for the rest of his days. Another experienced deep despair and followed his father into drinking. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself endured bouts of overwhelming sadness and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His Maud is told by a insane person: he must frequently have questioned whether he might turn into one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was striking, almost charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome. Before he adopted a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a gathering. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his family members – three brothers to an small space – as an adult he craved solitude, withdrawing into stillness when in company, retreating for lonely journeys.
Deep Anxieties and Crisis of Conviction
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the origin of species, were posing disturbing queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had commenced ages before the arrival of the human race, then how to believe that the planet had been created for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only created for mankind, who live on a minor world of a ordinary star The modern optical instruments and magnifying tools revealed areas infinitely large and beings infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s belief, considering such proof, in a deity who had made man in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then could the humanity follow suit?
Persistent Motifs: Sea Monster and Friendship
The biographer ties his narrative together with dual recurring motifs. The first he establishes initially – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the short sonnet establishes ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something vast, unspeakable and sad, concealed inaccessible of human inquiry, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of rhythm and as the originator of metaphors in which terrible enigma is condensed into a few brilliantly suggestive words.
The other element is the contrast. Where the imaginary beast represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, evokes all that is loving and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme portraying him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on arm, hand and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of joy excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb nonsense of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the old man with a facial hair in which “two owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a wren” built their homes.
