The Vast Unknown: Examining Young Tennyson's Turbulent Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a divided individual. He even composed a piece named The Two Voices, in which two versions of the poet contemplated the pros and cons of ending his life. Through this insightful volume, the author chooses to focus on the lesser known character of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
The year 1850 became decisive for the poet. He unveiled the monumental verse series In Memoriam, over which he had toiled for close to twenty years. As a result, he emerged as both celebrated and prosperous. He got married, following a 14‑year courtship. Previously, he had been residing in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or staying alone in a rundown cottage on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Then he acquired a house where he could entertain distinguished callers. He became poet laureate. His career as a celebrated individual commenced.
Even as a youth he was imposing, even glamorous. He was very tall, messy but handsome
Lineage Turmoil
The Tennysons, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting prone to moods and sadness. His parent, a unwilling minister, was volatile and frequently inebriated. Transpired an occurrence, the details of which are unclear, that caused the family cook being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a lunatic asylum as a child and remained there for the rest of his days. Another suffered from deep melancholy and followed his father into addiction. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself endured bouts of debilitating gloom and what he called “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is narrated by a madman: he must often have pondered whether he was one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was striking, even glamorous. He was of great height, messy but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a dark cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a gathering. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his siblings – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an adult he desired privacy, withdrawing into stillness when in social settings, retreating for solitary journeys.
Philosophical Fears and Turmoil of Belief
During his era, geologists, celestial observers and those “natural philosophers” who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were posing frightening queries. If the timeline of existence had begun ages before the emergence of the mankind, then how to hold that the planet had been made for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was simply made for us, who live on a minor world of a ordinary star The new telescopes and lenses exposed spaces vast beyond measure and organisms minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s belief, given such evidence, in a God who had formed humanity in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then might the mankind meet the same fate?
Recurrent Themes: Kraken and Companionship
The author binds his account together with dual recurring themes. The first he establishes at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young student when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short verse establishes themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something vast, unspeakable and mournful, hidden out of reach of investigation, anticipates the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a master of rhythm and as the creator of symbols in which awful unknown is condensed into a few strikingly evocative lines.
The second element is the contrast. Where the fictional beast epitomises all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““he was my closest companion”, conjures all that is loving and humorous in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most majestic verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would unexpectedly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a grateful note in poetry depicting him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, placing their ““pink claws … on shoulder, wrist and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of pleasure nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of hedonism – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also summons up the brilliant absurdity of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a hen, multiple birds and a wren” constructed their nests.
