The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson existed as a divided spirit. He even composed a piece titled The Two Voices, in which dual aspects of his personality argued the merits of ending his life. Through this illuminating work, the biographer elects to spotlight on the overlooked persona of the writer.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 was decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for nearly twenty years. Consequently, he became both renowned and rich. He entered matrimony, following a long courtship. Earlier, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his family members, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or living alone in a ramshackle house on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren shores. Now he took a house where he could host notable callers. He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a celebrated individual began.
From his teens he was commanding, almost glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive
Lineage Struggles
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating susceptible to moods and depression. His father, a unwilling clergyman, was angry and very often drunk. Occurred an event, the particulars of which are unclear, that resulted in the domestic worker being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a child and remained there for life. Another experienced deep despair and emulated his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of overwhelming despair and what he termed “weird seizures”. His work Maud is told by a insane person: he must regularly have questioned whether he might turn into one personally.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive. Prior to he adopted a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could control a gathering. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an grown man he sought out solitude, retreating into silence when in social settings, disappearing for lonely journeys.
Philosophical Fears and Crisis of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were raising appalling queries. If the history of living beings had commenced millions of years before the arrival of the human race, then how to maintain that the planet had been made for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was only created for mankind, who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The modern optical instruments and lenses exposed spaces vast beyond measure and beings minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s belief, given such proof, in a deity who had made man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then could the mankind follow suit?
Repeating Themes: Mythical Beast and Friendship
The author binds his story together with a pair of recurrent themes. The primary he presents at the beginning – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young scholar when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the brief sonnet presents concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something immense, unutterable and tragic, concealed out of reach of human inquiry, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of rhythm and as the creator of images in which awful enigma is packed into a few strikingly indicative lines.
The second theme is the contrast. Where the imaginary sea monster represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is loving and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest lines with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a grateful note in verse depicting him in his rose garden with his tame doves resting all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on arm, palm and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of delight nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb foolishness of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, four larks and a tiny creature” made their homes.
