The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself existed as a conflicted spirit. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, where two facets of the poet debated the merits of self-destruction. Within this insightful work, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the lesser known persona of the writer.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 proved to be decisive for Tennyson. He released the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for close to twenty years. As a result, he became both celebrated and wealthy. He entered matrimony, following a 14‑year engagement. Earlier, he had been living in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or living by himself in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren shores. Now he acquired a home where he could receive notable guests. He became the national poet. His existence as a Great Man started.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Lineage Struggles
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning susceptible to emotional swings and sadness. His parent, a reluctant priest, was angry and frequently inebriated. There was an occurrence, the details of which are obscure, that led to the family cook being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another experienced severe melancholy and followed his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself experienced episodes of paralysing despair and what he termed “strange episodes”. His Maud is told by a lunatic: he must regularly have questioned whether he might turn into one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking. Before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a gathering. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his family members – several relatives to an small space – as an grown man he desired privacy, withdrawing into quiet when in company, retreating for individual walking tours.
Existential Fears and Turmoil of Conviction
During his era, rock experts, astronomers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were posing appalling questions. If the story of living beings had commenced ages before the appearance of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been formed for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply formed for humanity, who live on a minor world of a ordinary star The new optical instruments and lenses revealed spaces infinitely large and beings minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s religion, considering such findings, in a deity who had made man in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then could the mankind follow suit?
Recurrent Themes: Sea Monster and Friendship
The author binds his account together with a pair of recurrent motifs. The primary he introduces early on – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “ancient legends, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the short verse establishes concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something vast, unutterable and sad, concealed beyond reach of investigation, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a master of verse and as the author of symbols in which awful enigma is compressed into a few dazzlingly indicative lines.
The other element is the contrast. Where the imaginary beast represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is affectionate and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a appreciation message in poetry portraying him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, hand and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an image of pleasure excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb absurdity of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, several songbirds and a wren” constructed their dwellings.