The Boundless Deep: Delving into Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a torn individual. He even composed a piece named The Two Voices, wherein two facets of the poet contemplated the arguments of suicide. In this revealing book, the biographer chooses to focus on the lesser known persona of the poet.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 proved to be decisive for Tennyson. He released the great collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had worked for nearly two decades. Therefore, he emerged as both famous and prosperous. He got married, subsequent to a extended engagement. Earlier, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or living by himself in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Now he acquired a home where he could entertain prominent guests. He was appointed the national poet. His career as a renowned figure commenced.
From his teens he was striking, almost charismatic. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Lineage Challenges
His family, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting susceptible to temperament and sadness. His parent, a reluctant minister, was irate and very often drunk. Occurred an event, the details of which are vague, that caused the family cook being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a mental institution as a youth and lived there for his entire existence. Another endured severe despair and copied his father into drinking. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself endured periods of paralysing despair and what he called “strange episodes”. His Maud is voiced by a madman: he must regularly have questioned whether he was one personally.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was commanding, almost magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking. Even before he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a gathering. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his family members – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an adult he sought out isolation, withdrawing into stillness when in groups, disappearing for lonely journeys.
Deep Fears and Crisis of Faith
During his era, rock experts, astronomers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the origin of species, were introducing frightening queries. If the story of existence had commenced eons before the appearance of the human race, then how to believe that the planet had been formed for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply made for us, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The recent viewing devices and lenses exposed areas infinitely large and organisms infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s belief, given such proof, in a God who had formed mankind in his own image? If dinosaurs had become vanished, then would the mankind do so too?
Recurrent Themes: Sea Monster and Bond
The biographer weaves his account together with two recurrent motifs. The initial he establishes at the beginning – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he wrote his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Nordic tales, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the biblical text”, the 15-line sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its feeling of something enormous, unutterable and sad, concealed out of reach of human understanding, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of verse and as the author of metaphors in which terrible mystery is packed into a few brilliantly indicative lines.
The second element is the contrast. Where the fictional beast epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, penned a appreciation message in verse portraying him in his flower bed with his tame doves sitting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, palm and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an picture of delight perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s notable praise of enjoyment – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb foolishness of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the old man with a facial hair in which “a pair of owls and a hen, four larks and a small bird” built their nests.
