The Vast Unknown: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a divided spirit. He produced a verse called The Two Voices, in which contrasting versions of himself debated the merits of suicide. Through this illuminating work, the author chooses to focus on the more obscure persona of the literary figure.
A Critical Year: 1850
During 1850 was decisive for Alfred. He released the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for almost twenty years. Consequently, he became both celebrated and rich. He wed, subsequent to a extended engagement. Previously, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his family members, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or staying in solitude in a rundown house on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Now he moved into a home where he could entertain prominent visitors. He became the national poet. His existence as a Great Man began.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive
Lineage Turmoil
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning inclined to emotional swings and melancholy. His parent, a hesitant minister, was irate and regularly intoxicated. Transpired an incident, the particulars of which are obscure, that resulted in the domestic worker being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a lunatic asylum as a youth and remained there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from profound depression and emulated his father into addiction. A third became addicted to the drug. Alfred himself endured episodes of debilitating gloom and what he termed “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is told by a madman: he must frequently have wondered whether he could become one personally.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was commanding, even glamorous. He was very tall, unkempt but good-looking. Prior to he adopted a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could control a gathering. But, being raised in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an attic room – as an adult he sought out solitude, escaping into stillness when in social settings, disappearing for individual journeys.
Existential Concerns and Turmoil of Faith
During his era, geologists, celestial observers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with Darwin about the origin of species, were introducing appalling queries. If the history of existence had started ages before the arrival of the mankind, then how to believe that the planet had been created for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely created for mankind, who reside on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The modern telescopes and magnifying tools revealed realms vast beyond measure and beings minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s faith, given such findings, in a divine being who had formed man in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then would the human race do so too?
Persistent Motifs: Sea Monster and Bond
Holmes binds his account together with a pair of recurring elements. The primary he introduces early on – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the short verse establishes ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something vast, unspeakable and sad, submerged out of reach of human inquiry, prefigures the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of metre and as the originator of images in which awful mystery is condensed into a few strikingly evocative phrases.
The additional theme is the contrast. Where the mythical creature symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is affectionate and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest lines with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a appreciation message in rhyme portraying him in his flower bed with his tame doves perching all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of delight perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s notable praise of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent absurdity of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, multiple birds and a wren” built their homes.
