The Vast Unknown: Delving into Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a divided individual. He produced a piece named The Two Voices, wherein contrasting facets of himself debated the pros and cons of ending his life. In this illuminating book, the author elects to spotlight on the lesser known identity of the writer.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 was pivotal for Alfred. He released the great verse series In Memoriam, for which he had worked for almost twenty years. Consequently, he became both celebrated and prosperous. He wed, following a extended relationship. Previously, he had been residing in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or residing with unmarried companions in London, or living in solitude in a dilapidated cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak beaches. At that point he moved into a home where he could receive prominent visitors. He was appointed the official poet. His career as a celebrated individual started.
Starting in adolescence he was imposing, even charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but handsome
Lineage Challenges
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating susceptible to moods and melancholy. His parent, a unwilling clergyman, was angry and very often intoxicated. Occurred an incident, the details of which are vague, that led to the household servant being killed by fire in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a psychiatric hospital as a child and remained there for life. Another suffered from severe melancholy and followed his father into alcoholism. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of paralysing sadness and what he referred to as “weird seizures”. His poem Maud is told by a lunatic: he must often have wondered whether he was one in his own right.
The Fascinating Figure of Young Tennyson
From his teens he was commanding, even glamorous. He was of great height, unkempt but good-looking. Before he adopted a black Spanish cloak and sombrero, he could control a room. But, having grown up in close quarters with his siblings – three brothers to an small space – as an mature individual he desired solitude, escaping into stillness when in groups, retreating for lonely excursions.
Existential Anxieties and Crisis of Faith
During his era, earth scientists, astronomers and those early researchers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the origin of species, were raising frightening inquiries. If the timeline of living beings had started eons before the emergence of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely created for us, who live on a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The new viewing devices and microscopes exposed areas immensely huge and creatures minutely tiny: how to maintain one’s religion, considering such proof, in a divine being who had formed mankind in his form? If dinosaurs had become died out, then would the mankind follow suit?
Recurrent Elements: Mythical Beast and Companionship
Holmes binds his account together with a pair of recurring themes. The initial he establishes initially – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old scholar when he penned his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “futuristic ideas and the scriptural reference”, the brief verse introduces ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something vast, indescribable and sad, hidden inaccessible of human inquiry, foreshadows the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a expert of verse and as the author of symbols in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few dazzlingly evocative phrases.
The second theme is the counterpart. Where the fictional creature represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his connection with a actual person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state ““there was no better ally”, summons up all that is fond and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes reveals a aspect of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his grandest phrases with “grotesque grimness”, would suddenly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, composed a grateful note in rhyme portraying him in his rose garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on arm, hand and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of delight perfectly adapted to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant foolishness of the two poets’ common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy Great Man, was also the source for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a hen, four larks and a small bird” made their nests.
