Uncharted Depths: Exploring Early Tennyson's Restless Years

The poet Tennyson existed as a divided soul. He even composed a piece named The Two Voices, wherein two facets of his personality contemplated the merits of self-destruction. Through this illuminating volume, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known identity of the writer.

A Defining Year: 1850

The year 1850 proved to be decisive for the poet. He published the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, for which he had worked for nearly twenty years. Consequently, he grew both famous and prosperous. He entered matrimony, following a extended engagement. Earlier, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or staying with bachelor friends in London, or residing by himself in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Then he moved into a home where he could host notable visitors. He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a Great Man commenced.

Even as a youth he was commanding, even charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking

Ancestral Struggles

His family, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, indicating inclined to moods and melancholy. His parent, a unwilling minister, was irate and very often inebriated. Transpired an event, the details of which are unclear, that resulted in the household servant being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was confined to a lunatic asylum as a boy and stayed there for his entire existence. Another endured profound depression and emulated his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself endured bouts of overwhelming despair and what he termed “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is voiced by a lunatic: he must often have pondered whether he could become one himself.

The Compelling Figure of Young Tennyson

Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, disheveled but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could control a room. But, maturing in close quarters with his family members – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he sought out solitude, retreating into quiet when in company, disappearing for individual journeys.

Deep Fears and Turmoil of Faith

In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, star gazers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing appalling questions. If the story of existence had begun ages before the arrival of the mankind, then how to believe that the world had been formed for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply created for humanity, who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The recent optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed areas vast beyond measure and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s belief, considering such proof, in a deity who had formed man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become died out, then might the mankind meet the same fate?

Repeating Themes: Sea Monster and Companionship

The biographer binds his narrative together with a pair of recurring themes. The first he presents at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young student when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “ancient legends, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief poem presents ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its feeling of something enormous, unutterable and tragic, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s debut as a virtuoso of verse and as the author of symbols in which terrible enigma is condensed into a few dazzlingly suggestive phrases.

The additional theme is the contrast. Where the mythical creature symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is fond and playful in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson infrequently known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive phrases with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, penned a appreciation message in rhyme depicting him in his garden with his pet birds perching all over him, setting their ““reddish toes … on back, palm and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of pleasure perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of hedonism – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb foolishness of the two poets’ shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a hen, four larks and a small bird” constructed their homes.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|