The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted spirit. He famously wrote a verse called The Two Voices, wherein two facets of himself debated the arguments of suicide. Through this illuminating book, the author elects to spotlight on the lesser known persona of the writer.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 became decisive for the poet. He released the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had worked for nearly twenty years. Consequently, he became both celebrated and wealthy. He wed, subsequent to a 14‑year engagement. Previously, he had been residing in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or living by himself in a ramshackle cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren coasts. Now he took a home where he could host distinguished guests. He became the national poet. His career as a renowned figure commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating inclined to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a unwilling priest, was angry and frequently inebriated. There was an occurrence, the facts of which are unclear, that led to the family cook being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a youth and lived there for the rest of his days. Another endured severe despair and followed his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of paralysing sadness and what he called “weird seizures”. His work Maud is told by a insane person: he must often have questioned whether he might turn into one personally.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was striking, almost magnetic. He was of great height, messy but good-looking. Even before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an grown man he desired privacy, retreating into stillness when in social settings, retreating for solitary excursions.
Philosophical Anxieties and Turmoil of Conviction
During his era, geologists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were posing appalling queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had commenced millions of years before the appearance of the mankind, then how to believe that the planet had been formed for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely formed for mankind, who live on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The modern viewing devices and lenses uncovered realms immensely huge and organisms minutely tiny: how to keep one’s faith, considering such findings, in a divine being who had created humanity in his own image? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then could the humanity meet the same fate?
Persistent Themes: Sea Monster and Friendship
The author weaves his account together with two persistent themes. The first he introduces at the beginning – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young student when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the 15-line poem establishes ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something enormous, indescribable and mournful, concealed inaccessible of investigation, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a master of metre and as the originator of images in which terrible enigma is compressed into a few dazzlingly evocative words.
The other motif is the counterpart. Where the fictional creature symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is loving and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest verses with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, penned a appreciation message in verse describing him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons resting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s notable praise of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant absurdity of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the old man with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, multiple birds and a small bird” made their nests.
