The Boundless Deep: Delving into Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted individual. He produced a poem named The Two Voices, wherein contrasting versions of the poet debated the arguments of self-destruction. Through this illuminating book, the author chooses to focus on the overlooked character of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 proved to be decisive for Tennyson. He released the monumental verse series In Memoriam, for which he had worked for close to twenty years. Consequently, he grew both famous and rich. He wed, subsequent to a long courtship. Earlier, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or staying by himself in a rundown cottage on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Now he acquired a home where he could host notable visitors. He became the official poet. His existence as a renowned figure began.
Even as a youth he was imposing, even magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive
Family Struggles
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating susceptible to temperament and sadness. His parent, a unwilling minister, was irate and frequently drunk. Transpired an occurrence, the particulars of which are obscure, that caused the domestic worker being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a lunatic asylum as a boy and lived there for the rest of his days. Another experienced deep despair and followed his father into alcoholism. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself experienced bouts of paralysing despair and what he called “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have pondered whether he was one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was striking, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but handsome. Before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a gathering. But, being raised crowded with his family members – three brothers to an attic room – as an mature individual he desired privacy, retreating into quiet when in social settings, vanishing for solitary excursions.
Philosophical Concerns and Upheaval of Faith
During his era, rock experts, star gazers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Darwin about the origin of species, were introducing disturbing inquiries. If the history of existence had begun ages before the emergence of the humanity, then how to hold that the earth had been created for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was only made for mankind, who inhabit a minor world of a common sun.” The modern telescopes and microscopes revealed areas vast beyond measure and beings minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s religion, considering such findings, in a God who had formed man in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then would the human race meet the same fate?
Recurrent Themes: Sea Monster and Bond
The author binds his story together with two recurring elements. The initial he establishes at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line poem establishes concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something enormous, unspeakable and sad, submerged beyond reach of investigation, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of metre and as the creator of symbols in which awful mystery is packed into a few brilliantly evocative lines.
The additional theme is the contrast. Where the mythical sea monster symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a grateful note in rhyme describing him in his flower bed with his pet birds resting all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on back, hand and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an image of delight nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s notable praise of hedonism – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb foolishness of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “two owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a tiny creature” built their dwellings.
