The Boundless Deep: Delving into Early Tennyson's Turbulent Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a conflicted individual. He famously wrote a poem named The Two Voices, where dual versions of his personality argued the pros and cons of self-destruction. In this illuminating book, the biographer chooses to focus on the more obscure identity of the writer.
A Defining Year: 1850
The year 1850 became decisive for the poet. He unveiled the great poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for nearly a long period. As a result, he grew both renowned and prosperous. He wed, subsequent to a extended engagement. Earlier, he had been living in leased properties with his family members, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or residing in solitude in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Now he moved into a residence where he could entertain notable visitors. He assumed the role of the national poet. His existence as a Great Man began.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, almost glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking
Lineage Challenges
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating inclined to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a hesitant clergyman, was angry and regularly intoxicated. Transpired an incident, the particulars of which are vague, that resulted in the family cook being burned to death in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a youth and stayed there for life. Another suffered from severe melancholy and followed his father into addiction. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself endured bouts of paralysing gloom and what he termed “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is narrated by a lunatic: he must frequently have pondered whether he could become one himself.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was imposing, almost glamorous. He was of great height, disheveled but good-looking. Even before he started wearing a Spanish-style cape and headwear, he could command a room. But, having grown up in close quarters with his family members – three brothers to an attic room – as an grown man he craved privacy, withdrawing into stillness when in company, vanishing for solitary journeys.
Philosophical Fears and Crisis of Faith
During his era, rock experts, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the evolution, were introducing disturbing queries. If the timeline of living beings had commenced ages before the appearance of the humanity, then how to believe that the planet had been formed for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely made for us, who live on a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The modern optical instruments and lenses uncovered areas infinitely large and creatures infinitesimally small: how to keep one’s religion, considering such findings, in a deity who had formed mankind in his own image? If ancient reptiles had become died out, then could the human race do so too?
Repeating Elements: Kraken and Friendship
The biographer weaves his narrative together with a pair of recurrent motifs. The initial he presents early on – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its mix of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief sonnet establishes themes to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its impression of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, submerged out of reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s emergence as a master of rhythm and as the author of images in which dreadful unknown is packed into a few brilliantly suggestive lines.
The additional motif is the contrast. Where the fictional sea monster represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a real-life figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, summons up all that is fond and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, wrote a thank-you letter in rhyme describing him in his rose garden with his tame doves perching all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on arm, palm and knee”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of delight perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s great praise of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent nonsense of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “two owls and a fowl, four larks and a wren” made their nests.
