Uncharted Depths: Exploring Young Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a divided soul. He famously wrote a verse titled The Two Voices, in which dual versions of the poet debated the pros and cons of self-destruction. In this insightful book, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the more obscure identity of the writer.
A Pivotal Year: 1850
The year 1850 proved to be pivotal for the poet. He published the significant verse series In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for close to twenty years. As a result, he emerged as both famous and wealthy. He wed, subsequent to a 14‑year engagement. Previously, he had been residing in rented homes with his family members, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his native Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Now he acquired a residence where he could host distinguished visitors. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His career as a celebrated individual began.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, messy but handsome
Family Challenges
The Tennysons, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting prone to moods and depression. His father, a reluctant clergyman, was irate and frequently drunk. Occurred an occurrence, the details of which are unclear, that led to the family cook being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a child and remained there for his entire existence. Another suffered from profound melancholy and copied his father into alcoholism. A third developed an addiction to the drug. Alfred himself experienced bouts of overwhelming sadness and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is told by a insane person: he must frequently have pondered whether he was one himself.
The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was imposing, even charismatic. He was of great height, messy but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could dominate a gathering. But, maturing in close quarters with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an attic room – as an grown man he craved isolation, withdrawing into quiet when in social settings, disappearing for solitary excursions.
Philosophical Anxieties and Crisis of Faith
During his era, earth scientists, astronomers and those “natural philosophers” who were beginning to think with Charles Darwin about the biological beginnings, were raising disturbing queries. If the history of living beings had commenced millions of years before the appearance of the mankind, then how to maintain that the planet had been created for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was only created for mankind, who inhabit a minor world of a common sun.” The recent optical instruments and microscopes exposed areas vast beyond measure and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s faith, considering such proof, in a God who had created man in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become died out, then would the human race do so too?
Recurrent Themes: Kraken and Bond
The author ties his story together with two persistent motifs. The first he establishes at the beginning – it is the symbol of the Kraken. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its combination of “ancient legends, “earlier biology, 19th-century science fiction and the Book of Revelations”, the 15-line sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its feeling of something enormous, indescribable and sad, concealed out of reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a master of rhythm and as the originator of symbols in which dreadful enigma is condensed into a few dazzlingly evocative phrases.
The second theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the imaginary beast represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is loving and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““the companion” at home, wrote a grateful note in poetry depicting him in his flower bed with his pet birds resting all over him, placing their ““reddish toes … on shoulder, hand and lap”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of delight excellently tailored to FitzGerald’s great praise of enjoyment – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb absurdity of the pair's common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the sad renowned figure, was also the inspiration for Lear’s verse about the old man with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a small bird” constructed their nests.
