The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson existed as a divided individual. He produced a verse titled The Two Voices, in which contrasting facets of himself debated the pros and cons of ending his life. In this insightful work, the author decides to concentrate on the overlooked identity of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
During 1850 was decisive for Tennyson. He unveiled the great poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for almost two decades. As a result, he became both famous and prosperous. He entered matrimony, following a extended relationship. Previously, he had been dwelling in rented homes with his relatives, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or residing alone in a ramshackle house on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. At that point he moved into a home where he could entertain notable callers. He assumed the role of the official poet. His career as a renowned figure commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, messy but attractive
Lineage Struggles
His family, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting prone to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a reluctant minister, was angry and regularly inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the details of which are vague, that caused the domestic worker being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and remained there for his entire existence. Another suffered from profound melancholy and followed his father into drinking. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself endured bouts of paralysing despair and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His work Maud is told by a lunatic: he must frequently have questioned whether he was one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson
Even as a youth he was commanding, even magnetic. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome. Even before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could command a space. But, having grown up in close quarters with his family members – three brothers to an small space – as an adult he sought out isolation, withdrawing into quiet when in social settings, retreating for individual excursions.
Existential Concerns and Turmoil of Faith
In that period, earth scientists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing frightening queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had started eons before the appearance of the humanity, then how to hold that the world had been made for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only made for us, who reside on a minor world of a third-rate sun The modern telescopes and lenses exposed spaces immensely huge and creatures minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s religion, in light of such evidence, in a divine being who had formed humanity in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then might the mankind follow suit?
Recurrent Themes: Sea Monster and Bond
The author binds his story together with two persistent motifs. The primary he introduces at the beginning – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line verse presents themes to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something enormous, unutterable and mournful, concealed out of reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a master of rhythm and as the author of metaphors in which dreadful mystery is packed into a few dazzlingly evocative phrases.
The second theme is the counterpart. Where the imaginary beast symbolises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is fond and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a side of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, wrote a appreciation message in poetry depicting him in his garden with his pet birds perching all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of pleasure excellently suited to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the excellent foolishness of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the old man with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a hen, multiple birds and a tiny creature” constructed their nests.
