The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Restless Years

Alfred Tennyson emerged as a conflicted soul. He produced a verse titled The Two Voices, wherein dual versions of the poet debated the merits of ending his life. Within this insightful work, the author decides to concentrate on the lesser known identity of the writer.

A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century

In the year 1850 became crucial for the poet. He released the monumental verse series In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for close to twenty years. Therefore, he grew both celebrated and wealthy. He wed, following a extended courtship. Previously, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or residing alone in a ramshackle cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren shores. Then he took a home where he could host prominent callers. He was appointed poet laureate. His life as a Great Man began.

From his teens he was imposing, verging on glamorous. He was very tall, messy but good-looking

Lineage Turmoil

His family, wrote Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning prone to emotional swings and sadness. His father, a unwilling clergyman, was volatile and regularly intoxicated. Occurred an incident, the particulars of which are unclear, that caused the family cook being killed by fire in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a mental institution as a boy and remained there for the rest of his days. Another endured deep melancholy and emulated his father into drinking. A third fell into narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from periods of debilitating despair and what he referred to as “bizarre fits”. His work Maud is told by a lunatic: he must regularly have pondered whether he was one in his own right.

The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson

From his teens he was imposing, almost magnetic. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome. Prior to he began to wear a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a room. But, having grown up crowded with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an small space – as an adult he sought out isolation, withdrawing into silence when in social settings, disappearing for lonely journeys.

Deep Fears and Turmoil of Faith

During his era, rock experts, star gazers and those scientific thinkers who were exploring ideas with Charles Darwin about the evolution, were posing disturbing inquiries. If the timeline of existence had commenced ages before the emergence of the humanity, then how to maintain that the world had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It seems impossible,” wrote Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was merely formed for humanity, who reside on a minor world of a third-rate sun The modern viewing devices and microscopes revealed realms immensely huge and beings tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s faith, considering such findings, in a divine being who had formed man in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become vanished, then would the mankind follow suit?

Repeating Themes: Kraken and Companionship

The biographer weaves his story together with a pair of persistent elements. The initial he presents early on – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a young scholar when he composed his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Nordic tales, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short poem establishes ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something vast, unspeakable and sad, concealed out of reach of human inquiry, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s introduction as a master of metre and as the originator of metaphors in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few strikingly indicative words.

The additional motif is the contrast. Where the imaginary sea monster represents all that is lugubrious about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life person, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would write “I had no truer friend”, evokes all that is fond and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes presents a side of Tennyson infrequently previously seen. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest verses with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, composed a appreciation message in poetry depicting him in his garden with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on shoulder, hand and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of delight nicely suited to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of pleasure-seeking – his rendition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant absurdity of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be told that Tennyson, the mournful Great Man, was also the inspiration for Lear’s poem about the aged individual with a facial hair in which “two owls and a chicken, several songbirds and a small bird” constructed their dwellings.

A Compelling {Biography|Life Story|