The Vast Unknown: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson existed as a torn spirit. He produced a verse titled The Two Voices, in which two aspects of himself contemplated the arguments of suicide. Through this illuminating volume, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the more obscure identity of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
During 1850 was crucial for Tennyson. He published the great poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for nearly two decades. Therefore, he grew both famous and rich. He wed, subsequent to a long relationship. Previously, he had been living in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or residing alone in a rundown dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak coasts. Now he took a home where he could entertain distinguished visitors. He became the national poet. His life as a celebrated individual commenced.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but attractive
Family Struggles
The Tennyson clan, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating inclined to emotional swings and melancholy. His parent, a hesitant minister, was volatile and very often inebriated. Occurred an occurrence, the particulars of which are unclear, that caused the family cook being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and lived there for his entire existence. Another endured severe despair and followed his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself suffered from periods of paralysing gloom and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must frequently have wondered whether he might turn into one personally.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was imposing, even charismatic. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive. Even before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a space. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his family members – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he sought out privacy, escaping into quiet when in groups, disappearing for individual excursions.
Existential Concerns and Crisis of Conviction
In that period, earth scientists, celestial observers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the origin of species, were posing appalling questions. If the history of life on Earth had started ages before the emergence of the humanity, then how to maintain that the earth had been made for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely made for humanity, who live on a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The new optical instruments and microscopes exposed spaces vast beyond measure and organisms infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s faith, given such findings, in a deity who had created humanity in his likeness? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the human race meet the same fate?
Persistent Elements: Mythical Beast and Friendship
The biographer binds his account together with two recurring themes. The first he introduces at the beginning – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful student when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the short poem establishes concepts to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something vast, indescribable and sad, submerged inaccessible of human understanding, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of metre and as the author of images in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few brilliantly evocative words.
The additional motif is the contrast. Where the mythical sea monster symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life figure, 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 aspect of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest lines with “grotesque grimness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, penned a grateful note in verse describing him in his garden with his tame doves resting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of joy nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s notable exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent foolishness of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, four larks and a wren” built their homes.
