The Vast Unknown: Delving into Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson emerged as a conflicted individual. He produced a poem named The Two Voices, in which contrasting versions of his personality debated the pros and cons of ending his life. Through this revealing volume, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the overlooked character of the writer.
A Defining Year: That Fateful Year
During 1850 became decisive for Alfred. He published the significant verse series In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for almost two decades. Therefore, he became both celebrated and rich. He got married, subsequent to a 14‑year engagement. Earlier, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate coasts. Then he moved into a house where he could host prominent callers. He became the official poet. His career as a renowned figure began.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive
Family Struggles
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting inclined to temperament and sadness. His father, a hesitant minister, was irate and regularly drunk. There was an event, the details of which are obscure, that led to the family cook being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a boy and remained there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from severe melancholy and emulated his father into addiction. A third fell into the drug. Alfred himself endured bouts of paralysing despair and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is told by a lunatic: he must regularly have questioned whether he might turn into one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but attractive. Prior to he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could command a gathering. But, being raised in close quarters with his siblings – several relatives to an attic room – as an adult he desired isolation, retreating into stillness when in groups, retreating for lonely excursions.
Existential Concerns and Upheaval of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, earth scientists, celestial observers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were introducing disturbing queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had commenced eons before the appearance of the human race, then how to maintain that the world had been made for people's enjoyment? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was simply created for us, who inhabit a minor world of a ordinary star The new optical instruments and microscopes revealed areas immensely huge and organisms infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s faith, given such proof, in a God who had created mankind in his form? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then might the human race meet the same fate?
Recurrent Motifs: Mythical Beast and Bond
The author ties his account together with two persistent elements. The primary he establishes initially – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its mix of “Norse mythology, “historical science, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line verse introduces concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something immense, unutterable and mournful, concealed beyond reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s debut as a expert of rhythm and as the creator of metaphors in which terrible enigma is condensed into a few brilliantly indicative phrases.
The other theme is the contrast. Where the mythical sea monster represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is loving and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest lines with ““odd solemnity”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a thank-you letter in rhyme describing him in his rose garden with his tame doves resting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on back, hand and leg”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of joy perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s great celebration of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant absurdity of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “two owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a wren” built their nests.
