The Vast Unknown: Exploring Young Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a torn soul. He produced a verse called The Two Voices, wherein dual versions of his personality contemplated the pros and cons of ending his life. Within this illuminating volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the lesser known character of the writer.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 became crucial for Tennyson. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for almost two decades. Therefore, he grew both renowned and wealthy. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a extended courtship. Earlier, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Then he acquired a house where he could receive distinguished callers. He assumed the role of the national poet. His existence as a celebrated individual started.
From his teens he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking
Family Struggles
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting susceptible to moods and depression. His father, a reluctant minister, was volatile and regularly inebriated. Transpired an event, the particulars of which are obscure, that resulted in the family cook being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a mental institution as a child and lived there for his entire existence. Another endured profound despair and followed his father into drinking. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself experienced episodes of debilitating sadness and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His work Maud is told by a insane person: he must regularly have wondered whether he was one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was striking, verging on charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive. Before he adopted a dark cloak and headwear, he could command a gathering. But, being raised crowded with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an small space – as an grown man he craved privacy, escaping into silence when in company, retreating for lonely walking tours.
Existential Concerns and Upheaval of Belief
During his era, earth scientists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the evolution, were raising frightening questions. If the history of living beings had begun millions of years before the arrival of the mankind, then how to hold that the earth had been made for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only formed for humanity, who live on a minor world of a ordinary star The modern viewing devices and magnifying tools exposed areas vast beyond measure and organisms infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s belief, given such proof, in a deity who had formed man in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then would the mankind do so too?
Recurrent Themes: Mythical Beast and Bond
The biographer binds his story together with a pair of recurring elements. The first he presents early on – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its blend of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line sonnet establishes concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, concealed out of reach of human understanding, anticipates the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of metre and as the author of metaphors in which dreadful unknown is compressed into a few dazzlingly suggestive words.
The additional element is the counterpart. Where the fictional sea monster symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is loving and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, wrote a appreciation message in verse portraying him in his flower bed with his tame doves resting all over him, placing their “rosy feet … on arm, palm and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of delight nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s great celebration of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb nonsense of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a beard in which “two owls and a fowl, four larks and a wren” made their nests.
