The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Alfred Tennyson existed as a torn spirit. He produced a poem named The Two Voices, where dual aspects of his personality debated the arguments of self-destruction. Through this illuminating book, Richard Holmes decides to concentrate on the overlooked persona of the writer.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
During 1850 was crucial for the poet. He released the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, on which he had laboured for close to two decades. Consequently, he emerged as both celebrated and wealthy. He wed, after a long courtship. Earlier, he had been residing in rented homes with his mother and siblings, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a dilapidated cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Then he acquired a home where he could receive distinguished visitors. He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a renowned figure started.
Starting in adolescence he was striking, almost charismatic. He was very tall, disheveled but attractive
Family Challenges
His family, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning prone to emotional swings and sadness. His paternal figure, a hesitant minister, was irate and regularly intoxicated. Occurred an occurrence, the details of which are obscure, that caused the domestic worker being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a child and lived there for his entire existence. Another suffered from severe despair and followed his father into alcoholism. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself experienced periods of debilitating despair and what he termed “strange episodes”. His Maud is voiced by a madman: he must regularly have pondered whether he might turn into one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was striking, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, disheveled but handsome. Before he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a gathering. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – multiple siblings to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he sought out solitude, escaping into silence when in company, vanishing for individual walking tours.
Philosophical Concerns and Crisis of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, rock experts, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with Darwin about the evolution, were introducing frightening inquiries. If the story of life on Earth had begun ages before the arrival of the mankind, then how to hold that the planet had been made for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was only formed for humanity, who live on a minor world of a ordinary star The recent optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed areas vast beyond measure and creatures minutely tiny: how to keep one’s religion, considering such evidence, in a deity who had formed humanity in his likeness? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then might the mankind meet the same fate?
Recurrent Motifs: Kraken and Companionship
Holmes weaves his story together with dual recurrent themes. The primary he establishes early on – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old student when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something immense, unutterable and tragic, hidden out of reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of metre and as the author of metaphors in which dreadful mystery is compressed into a few dazzlingly suggestive lines.
The other motif is the counterpart. Where the mythical creature symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a actual figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is affectionate and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a aspect of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most impressive phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““the companion” at home, wrote a grateful note in poetry describing him in his rose garden with his pet birds perching all over him, setting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, palm and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of delight nicely tailored to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant absurdity of the both writers' mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the sad celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, multiple birds and a small bird” constructed their dwellings.
