The Vast Unknown: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a divided individual. He famously wrote a piece called The Two Voices, wherein contrasting facets of his personality debated the pros and cons of ending his life. Through this revealing work, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known persona of the writer.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 was pivotal for Alfred. He published the monumental verse series In Memoriam, for which he had laboured for nearly two decades. Consequently, he became both renowned and rich. He entered matrimony, following a 14‑year courtship. Before that, he had been living in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or residing with male acquaintances in London, or residing in solitude in a dilapidated cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Now he took a residence where he could receive prominent visitors. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His existence as a celebrated individual commenced.
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but good-looking
Lineage Struggles
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting prone to emotional swings and melancholy. His father, a reluctant priest, was angry and regularly drunk. There was an incident, the particulars of which are obscure, that caused the domestic worker being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a youth and remained there for his entire existence. Another endured profound depression and copied his father into alcoholism. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of overwhelming gloom and what he termed “weird seizures”. His Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must often have pondered whether he could become one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive. Prior to he began to wear a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could dominate a space. But, being raised in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – several relatives to an small space – as an mature individual he desired privacy, withdrawing into silence when in company, retreating for solitary journeys.
Deep Concerns and Turmoil of Faith
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, astronomers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were raising frightening queries. If the history of living beings had begun millions of years before the appearance of the humanity, then how to maintain that the earth had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It is inconceivable,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only formed for mankind, who inhabit a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The modern viewing devices and microscopes exposed spaces vast beyond measure and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s belief, given such findings, in a divine being who had formed humanity in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then might the mankind follow suit?
Recurrent Elements: Sea Monster and Friendship
The author ties his account together with a pair of recurring elements. The initial he establishes early on – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young student when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the short poem establishes concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and sad, submerged beyond reach of human understanding, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a master of verse and as the author of metaphors in which terrible unknown is condensed into a few brilliantly evocative lines.
The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary creature represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is fond and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, wrote a appreciation message in poetry describing him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons sitting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, wrist and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of delight nicely suited to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant nonsense of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “two owls and a fowl, four larks and a tiny creature” built their homes.
