The Vast Unknown: Delving into Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself existed as a conflicted soul. He famously wrote a poem named The Two Voices, wherein two aspects of the poet argued the pros and cons of suicide. Within this insightful work, the author decides to concentrate on the overlooked identity of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
In the year 1850 was crucial for the poet. He unveiled the significant verse series In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for almost a long period. Therefore, he emerged as both renowned and rich. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a 14‑year courtship. Earlier, he had been residing in leased properties with his relatives, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or residing in solitude in a rundown dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Then he moved into a home where he could entertain distinguished guests. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His career as a Great Man began.
Starting in adolescence he was striking, verging on magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive
Family Challenges
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting susceptible to emotional swings and depression. His father, a reluctant priest, was irate and very often intoxicated. Occurred an event, the facts of which are obscure, that resulted in the family cook being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another endured severe depression and copied his father into addiction. A third became addicted to opium. Alfred himself suffered from episodes of debilitating gloom and what he called “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must frequently have wondered whether he could become one in his own right.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but handsome. Before he adopted a dark cloak and sombrero, he could control a room. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an attic room – as an adult he sought out isolation, escaping into silence when in social settings, retreating for individual walking tours.
Existential Fears and Crisis of Conviction
In that period, rock experts, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the evolution, were posing frightening inquiries. If the story of existence had begun eons before the arrival of the humanity, then how to hold that the earth had been created for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely made for mankind, who reside on a third-rate planet of a ordinary star The new optical instruments and lenses revealed spaces infinitely large and beings minutely tiny: how to keep one’s faith, given such findings, in a deity who had made mankind in his form? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then would the human race meet the same fate?
Persistent Motifs: Mythical Beast and Friendship
Holmes binds his account together with a pair of recurrent themes. The first he presents early on – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young undergraduate when he wrote his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the Book of Revelations”, the brief sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its sense of something vast, indescribable and tragic, submerged out of reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the author of metaphors in which awful enigma is condensed into a few brilliantly indicative lines.
The additional theme is the contrast. Where the mythical creature epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is affectionate and humorous in the artist. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson rarely previously seen. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his grandest verses with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, penned a thank-you letter in rhyme depicting him in his flower bed with his pet birds sitting all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on shoulder, hand and leg”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of delight nicely adapted to FitzGerald’s great praise of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant nonsense of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “nocturnal birds and a chicken, four larks and a small bird” constructed their dwellings.
