The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a divided spirit. He produced a verse titled The Two Voices, in which two facets of himself contemplated the pros and cons of suicide. In this illuminating work, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the overlooked persona of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 proved to be decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for close to two decades. As a result, he grew both renowned and rich. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a long courtship. Before that, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or staying in solitude in a dilapidated cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Then he moved into a residence where he could host notable visitors. He became the official poet. His life as a Great Man began.
Even as a youth he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was very tall, disheveled but handsome
Lineage Turmoil
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning prone to moods and melancholy. His father, a unwilling clergyman, was angry and frequently inebriated. Transpired an incident, the details of which are obscure, that led to the domestic worker being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a boy and remained there for his entire existence. Another suffered from profound melancholy and copied his father into alcoholism. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself experienced bouts of overwhelming gloom and what he called “weird seizures”. His work Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must regularly have questioned whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking. Prior to he adopted a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could dominate a gathering. But, being raised in close quarters with his siblings – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an mature individual he sought out privacy, retreating into stillness when in groups, vanishing for lonely excursions.
Deep Fears and Crisis of Conviction
In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were introducing appalling questions. If the timeline of life on Earth had started eons before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the world had been created for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely formed for mankind, who reside on a minor world of a third-rate sun The modern optical instruments and lenses uncovered areas infinitely large and beings minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s religion, in light of such findings, in a divine being who had made humanity in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then would the humanity meet the same fate?
Repeating Elements: Kraken and Friendship
The author binds his story together with dual recurring motifs. The first he presents early on – it is the image of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the brief sonnet introduces themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something vast, unutterable and sad, hidden inaccessible of human understanding, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a master of rhythm and as the creator of symbols in which awful mystery is compressed into a few strikingly indicative words.
The additional motif is the contrast. Where the imaginary sea monster symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is fond and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a grateful note in poetry portraying him in his garden with his pet birds resting all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on arm, hand and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of pleasure nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s great celebration of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant foolishness of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “two owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a wren” built their homes.
