The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Alfred Tennyson was known as a conflicted soul. He produced a poem called The Two Voices, wherein dual aspects of the poet argued the merits of self-destruction. Through this insightful volume, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the overlooked persona of the writer.
A Defining Year: 1850
During 1850 was decisive for Alfred. He published the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had worked for close to a long period. Therefore, he became both famous and prosperous. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a extended engagement. Earlier, he had been residing in rented homes 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 bleak shores. Then he acquired a home where he could host distinguished visitors. He became the national poet. His life as a renowned figure began.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost charismatic. He was of great height, messy but attractive
Lineage Struggles
His family, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating susceptible to moods and depression. His father, a reluctant priest, was angry and regularly drunk. Occurred an event, the particulars of which are unclear, that resulted in the domestic worker being burned to death in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a boy and remained there for life. Another experienced deep despair and copied his father into alcoholism. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of paralysing sadness and what he referred to as “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have wondered whether he could become one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was commanding, almost glamorous. He was of great height, messy but handsome. Even before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a space. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he craved solitude, escaping into quiet when in company, disappearing for solitary excursions.
Existential Fears and Upheaval of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were beginning to think with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing frightening queries. If the history of existence had begun millions of years before the arrival of the mankind, then how to believe that the world had been made for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was only created for mankind, who reside on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The recent telescopes and microscopes uncovered areas vast beyond measure and creatures infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s religion, given such findings, in a God who had created man in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then could the human race follow suit?
Repeating Themes: Mythical Beast and Bond
Holmes weaves his account together with dual recurring motifs. The first he establishes at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the brief verse presents themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something immense, unutterable and mournful, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of rhythm and as the author of symbols in which terrible mystery is condensed into a few brilliantly evocative words.
The second motif is the contrast. Where the mythical beast represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is fond and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson seldom previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, wrote a grateful note in rhyme describing him in his rose garden with his tame doves resting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, palm and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of joy perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the superb absurdity of the both writers' shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a hen, multiple birds and a wren” constructed their dwellings.
