The Boundless Deep: Delving into Young Tennyson's Restless Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a torn spirit. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, in which dual facets of himself argued the arguments of self-destruction. In this illuminating book, the author chooses to focus on the overlooked identity of the writer.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 proved to be pivotal for Tennyson. He unveiled the great poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for almost two decades. Consequently, he emerged as both celebrated and wealthy. He wed, after a 14‑year engagement. Previously, he had been residing in leased properties with his family members, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or staying in solitude in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's barren shores. Then he acquired a house where he could host prominent guests. He assumed the role of the official poet. His career as a celebrated individual started.
Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, disheveled but attractive
Ancestral Turmoil
His family, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, meaning inclined to temperament and depression. His parent, a reluctant clergyman, was irate and very often inebriated. There was an event, the facts of which are vague, that caused the household servant being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a mental institution as a boy and remained there for life. Another endured severe depression and emulated his father into drinking. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself endured bouts of paralysing despair and what he termed “weird seizures”. His work Maud is told by a lunatic: he must frequently have pondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was striking, even glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking. Prior to he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could dominate a gathering. But, maturing in close quarters with his family members – several relatives to an attic room – as an grown man he craved privacy, withdrawing into stillness when in company, vanishing for solitary walking tours.
Philosophical Fears and Upheaval of Faith
During his era, earth scientists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with Darwin about the origin of species, were posing disturbing queries. If the timeline of living beings had commenced millions of years before the arrival of the humanity, then how to maintain that the planet had been made for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that all of existence was only formed for humanity, who live on a minor world of a ordinary star The recent viewing devices and lenses revealed areas vast beyond measure and beings minutely tiny: how to keep one’s belief, considering such proof, in a deity who had created mankind in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then might the mankind follow suit?
Persistent Motifs: Mythical Beast and Companionship
The author weaves his account together with a pair of recurrent themes. The initial he introduces at the beginning – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young scholar when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the short poem presents themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something enormous, indescribable and mournful, hidden out of reach of investigation, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a master of metre and as the author of metaphors in which dreadful mystery is packed into a few brilliantly indicative phrases.
The additional element is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary sea monster epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic verses with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in poetry describing him in his rose garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, wrist and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great celebration of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent nonsense of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, multiple birds and a wren” constructed their nests.
