The Vast Unknown: Delving into Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a conflicted spirit. He famously wrote a verse called The Two Voices, wherein two aspects of himself debated the arguments of self-destruction. Within this insightful work, the author decides to concentrate on the more obscure identity of the poet.
A Defining Year: 1850
During 1850 was pivotal for Alfred. He released the monumental poem sequence In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for almost a long period. Therefore, he became both famous and prosperous. He got married, after a 14‑year courtship. Earlier, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or residing in solitude in a rundown house on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. Now he moved into a residence where he could entertain prominent guests. He assumed the role of the official poet. His life as a renowned figure began.
From his teens he was commanding, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive
Ancestral Challenges
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting susceptible to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a hesitant minister, was angry and very often inebriated. Transpired an event, the details of which are vague, that resulted in the household servant being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a lunatic asylum as a child and stayed there for his entire existence. Another experienced severe melancholy and followed his father into alcoholism. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself endured episodes of debilitating despair and what he called “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is narrated by a insane person: he must frequently have wondered whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was commanding, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but attractive. Before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could command a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his family members – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an adult he craved privacy, retreating into quiet when in company, vanishing for lonely excursions.
Existential Fears and Upheaval of Faith
In that period, geologists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were introducing frightening inquiries. If the story of living beings had begun ages before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the planet had been formed for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only made for us, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The modern optical instruments and lenses uncovered spaces immensely huge and creatures minutely tiny: how to keep one’s faith, in light of such proof, in a divine being who had made humanity in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then could the humanity do so too?
Repeating Themes: Kraken and Bond
Holmes weaves his story together with dual recurring themes. The first he introduces at the beginning – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “ancient legends, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the brief verse introduces concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something vast, unutterable and tragic, submerged inaccessible of investigation, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of verse and as the author of symbols in which terrible enigma is packed into a few brilliantly suggestive phrases.
The second theme is the contrast. Where the imaginary sea monster epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, penned a appreciation message in rhyme portraying him in his flower bed with his tame doves resting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, palm and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of delight excellently adapted to FitzGerald’s notable praise of enjoyment – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant foolishness of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a fowl, multiple birds and a tiny creature” made their nests.
