The Boundless Deep: Examining Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a divided individual. He produced a poem called The Two Voices, wherein two aspects of his personality contemplated the arguments of ending his life. In this revealing volume, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known character of the writer.
A Critical Year: 1850
The year 1850 became decisive for the poet. He published the great verse series In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for close to twenty years. As a result, he emerged as both famous and wealthy. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a 14‑year relationship. Previously, he had been residing in leased properties with his family members, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or residing by himself in a ramshackle house on one of his native Lincolnshire's barren shores. Now he moved into a home where he could receive notable visitors. He was appointed the national poet. His life as a Great Man began.
Even as a youth he was commanding, almost charismatic. He was very tall, disheveled but attractive
Family Turmoil
His family, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning prone to emotional swings and sadness. His parent, a reluctant priest, was volatile and very often intoxicated. There was an occurrence, the facts of which are unclear, that led to the family cook being fatally burned in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was placed in a lunatic asylum as a youth and lived there for his entire existence. Another endured severe melancholy and followed his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of overwhelming gloom and what he termed “strange episodes”. His Maud is narrated by a madman: he must frequently have questioned whether he was one himself.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was striking, almost magnetic. He was very tall, messy but attractive. Prior to he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a room. But, maturing crowded with his siblings – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an adult he sought out solitude, withdrawing into quiet when in company, retreating for individual excursions.
Existential Concerns and Turmoil of Belief
In that period, rock experts, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the origin of species, were raising appalling inquiries. If the story of life on Earth had begun eons before the appearance of the human race, then how to hold that the world had been made for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only made for humanity, who live on a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The modern telescopes and microscopes exposed realms vast beyond measure and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s faith, considering such proof, in a deity who had formed man in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then might the humanity meet the same fate?
Recurrent Elements: Kraken and Companionship
The biographer weaves his account together with two recurrent motifs. The initial he introduces initially – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young scholar when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something vast, unutterable and mournful, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a master of metre and as the author of symbols in which dreadful unknown is compressed into a few dazzlingly indicative phrases.
The additional element is the contrast. Where the fictional sea monster epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is fond and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, penned a grateful note in poetry describing him in his rose garden with his tame doves sitting all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an picture of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant absurdity of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the sad Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a facial hair in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, four larks and a small bird” made their nests.
