The Vast Unknown: Delving into Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a divided spirit. He produced a piece called The Two Voices, where contrasting versions of himself argued the pros and cons of suicide. Through this revealing book, the author decides to concentrate on the lesser known identity of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 was crucial for Alfred. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for almost a long period. As a result, he grew both celebrated and wealthy. He got married, subsequent to a long engagement. Previously, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a rundown dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Then he took a home where he could host prominent callers. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His existence as a renowned figure began.
From his teens he was striking, even glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but handsome
Family Turmoil
His family, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting inclined to temperament and melancholy. His father, a unwilling clergyman, was angry and frequently drunk. Transpired an incident, the details of which are unclear, that led to the household servant being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another experienced severe depression and emulated his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself experienced bouts of overwhelming despair and what he termed “weird seizures”. His Maud is voiced by a madman: he must regularly have questioned whether he was one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was of great height, messy but good-looking. Before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could command a gathering. But, having grown up crowded with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an small space – as an mature individual he craved isolation, retreating into silence when in groups, vanishing for solitary journeys.
Philosophical Concerns and Turmoil of Conviction
During his era, earth scientists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with Darwin about the evolution, were introducing frightening inquiries. If the story of life on Earth had started millions of years before the appearance of the mankind, then how to believe that the earth had been made for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely made for humanity, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The modern telescopes and magnifying tools exposed spaces vast beyond measure and beings tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s religion, given such evidence, in a divine being who had made humanity in his own image? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then would the humanity do so too?
Recurrent Elements: Sea Monster and Friendship
The author ties his story together with a pair of recurrent motifs. The first he establishes early on – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief sonnet establishes ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something vast, indescribable and tragic, submerged inaccessible of investigation, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a expert of rhythm and as the originator of images in which terrible mystery is packed into a few brilliantly evocative lines.
The second element is the counterpart. Where the imaginary creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is fond and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, penned a thank-you letter in rhyme portraying him in his rose garden with his pet birds perching all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, hand and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of joy nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s significant praise of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent absurdity of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the old man with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a small bird” constructed their homes.
