The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself was known as a conflicted soul. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, where two aspects of the poet debated the pros and cons of ending his life. Through this illuminating work, the biographer elects to spotlight on the lesser known character of the writer.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 was pivotal for Tennyson. He released the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had toiled for nearly a long period. Consequently, he grew both famous and prosperous. He got married, after a extended engagement. Earlier, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his family members, or staying with male acquaintances in London, or living in solitude in a dilapidated dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Now he moved into a home where he could host prominent guests. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His life as a renowned figure began.
From his teens he was striking, almost charismatic. He was of great height, messy but handsome
Lineage Turmoil
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning prone to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a hesitant minister, was volatile and regularly inebriated. Transpired an incident, the details of which are obscure, that led to the family cook being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from severe melancholy and followed his father into drinking. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of paralysing gloom and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is narrated by a madman: he must regularly have pondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, messy but good-looking. Even before he started wearing a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a room. But, having grown up in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he sought out isolation, retreating into quiet when in social settings, vanishing for lonely excursions.
Deep Fears and Turmoil of Conviction
In that period, earth scientists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the origin of species, were posing appalling questions. If the history of existence had begun millions of years before the appearance of the mankind, then how to hold that the world had been made for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only made for us, who live on a minor world of a common sun.” The recent optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed realms infinitely large and beings tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s religion, in light of such evidence, in a deity who had created humanity in his form? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then would the mankind follow suit?
Repeating Themes: Sea Monster and Friendship
The biographer binds his narrative together with a pair of recurrent elements. The first he introduces early on – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line poem presents ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something immense, unspeakable and mournful, submerged out of reach of human understanding, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of rhythm and as the originator of images in which dreadful enigma is packed into a few strikingly indicative phrases.
The second motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional sea monster epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic lines with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after seeing “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a grateful note in poetry depicting him in his rose garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on arm, hand and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of joy excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the superb foolishness of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, four larks and a wren” built their dwellings.
