The Vast Unknown: Exploring Early Tennyson's Troubled Years
Tennyson himself emerged as a divided individual. He even composed a piece called The Two Voices, in which two facets of the poet argued the pros and cons of suicide. Within this illuminating book, Richard Holmes chooses to focus on the lesser known persona of the writer.
A Critical Year: That Fateful Year
In the year 1850 proved to be crucial for Tennyson. He released the significant verse series In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for nearly two decades. Therefore, he became both renowned and rich. He got married, after a 14‑year courtship. Earlier, he had been residing in rented homes with his relatives, or residing with bachelor friends in London, or residing by himself in a rundown house on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Then he acquired a home where he could host notable callers. He was appointed the national poet. His life as a renowned figure began.
Even as a youth he was striking, even charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome
Family Turmoil
His family, noted Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning inclined to emotional swings and depression. His paternal figure, a hesitant priest, was volatile and frequently inebriated. Occurred an event, the details of which are vague, that resulted in the family cook being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s male relatives was confined to a lunatic asylum as a boy and lived there for his entire existence. Another suffered from deep despair and copied his father into addiction. A third became addicted to narcotics. Alfred himself endured bouts of debilitating despair and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is narrated by a madman: he must often have questioned whether he could become one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
Even as a youth he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but handsome. Even before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could dominate a space. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his siblings – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an grown man he desired isolation, escaping into quiet when in social settings, disappearing for solitary journeys.
Existential Concerns and Crisis of Belief
During his era, geologists, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were raising frightening inquiries. If the story of living beings had started millions of years before the appearance of the humanity, then how to believe that the world had been made for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was merely created for us, who live on a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The recent viewing devices and magnifying tools uncovered spaces infinitely large and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s belief, given such findings, in a divine being who had made mankind in his form? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then would the human race follow suit?
Repeating Motifs: Mythical Beast and Bond
Holmes weaves his account together with two recurring elements. The initial he presents at the beginning – it is the image of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief poem introduces ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, submerged beyond reach of human inquiry, anticipates the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a virtuoso of verse and as the originator of images in which awful mystery is packed into a few strikingly suggestive lines.
The additional element is the contrast. Where the fictional sea monster symbolises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is fond and lighthearted in the poet. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson rarely before encountered. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most majestic verses with “grotesque grimness”, would abruptly burst out laughing at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a grateful note in poetry depicting him in his garden with his pet birds perching all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, hand and lap”, and even on his skull. It’s an image of delight perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great praise of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant nonsense of the both writers' common acquaintance Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be informed that Tennyson, the mournful celebrated individual, was also the muse for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a hen, four larks and a small bird” constructed their dwellings.
