The Boundless Deep: Examining Young Tennyson's Troubled Years

The poet Tennyson was known as a divided spirit. He famously wrote a poem called The Two Voices, in which contrasting versions of his personality argued the arguments of suicide. Through this revealing work, Richard Holmes elects to spotlight on the overlooked persona of the writer.

A Pivotal Year: 1850

The year 1850 became crucial for Alfred. He unveiled the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for nearly twenty years. Consequently, he emerged as both celebrated and wealthy. He entered matrimony, after a long engagement. Earlier, he had been dwelling in temporary accommodations with his family members, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or staying in solitude in a dilapidated house on one of his local Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Now he acquired a home where he could host prominent callers. He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a renowned figure began.

Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, disheveled but attractive

Family Struggles

The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, suggesting inclined to moods and depression. His paternal figure, a unwilling minister, was angry and regularly intoxicated. There was an occurrence, the details of which are vague, that caused the household servant being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and stayed there for the rest of his days. Another experienced deep depression and emulated his father into drinking. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of debilitating sadness and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His Maud is voiced by a madman: he must often have pondered whether he could become one personally.

The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson

Even as a youth he was striking, almost glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive. Before he started wearing a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a space. But, being raised crowded with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an small space – as an grown man he craved solitude, withdrawing into stillness when in company, disappearing for individual walking tours.

Deep Concerns and Upheaval of Conviction

During his era, rock experts, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were raising disturbing questions. If the timeline of life on Earth had started ages before the appearance of the humanity, then how to maintain that the planet had been made for people's enjoyment? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was only created for mankind, who live on a minor world of a ordinary star The new telescopes and magnifying tools revealed areas vast beyond measure and beings minutely tiny: how to hold to one’s belief, in light of such proof, in a divine being who had created man in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then would the mankind follow suit?

Repeating Elements: Kraken and Bond

The author binds his account together with two persistent themes. The primary he establishes initially – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a young student when he composed his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its blend of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line poem establishes concepts to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something enormous, indescribable and mournful, submerged out of reach of human understanding, foreshadows the atmosphere of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of metre and as the creator of symbols in which awful enigma is packed into a few dazzlingly indicative words.

The additional theme is the counterpart. Where the fictional beast represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is fond and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes introduces us to a facet of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, penned a grateful note in poetry depicting him in his rose garden with his pet birds perching all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on arm, hand and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an vision of delight nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s great celebration of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb foolishness of the pair's shared companion Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the aged individual with a beard in which “two owls and a hen, multiple birds and a wren” built their dwellings.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|