The Vast Unknown: Examining Early Tennyson's Restless Years
Tennyson himself was known as a conflicted individual. He produced a piece called The Two Voices, in which dual aspects of himself contemplated the pros and cons of suicide. Through this revealing volume, the author decides to concentrate on the more obscure character of the poet.
A Critical Year: The Mid-Century
The year 1850 became decisive for the poet. He released the monumental collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had worked for nearly two decades. Consequently, he emerged as both renowned and wealthy. He got married, following a extended relationship. Before that, he had been residing in rented homes with his relatives, or lodging with male acquaintances in London, or staying in solitude in a dilapidated cottage on one of his local Lincolnshire's barren beaches. Now he moved into a house where he could entertain distinguished callers. He was appointed the national poet. His career as a Great Man started.
Starting in adolescence he was commanding, verging on magnetic. He was of great height, unkempt but handsome
Family Turmoil
The Tennysons, noted Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, indicating susceptible to moods and melancholy. His paternal figure, a reluctant clergyman, was irate and regularly intoxicated. There was an occurrence, the facts of which are obscure, that resulted in the family cook being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a boy and remained there for his entire existence. Another suffered from deep melancholy and emulated his father into addiction. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself suffered from periods of debilitating gloom and what he termed “strange episodes”. His poem Maud is told by a lunatic: he must regularly have wondered whether he was one personally.
The Intriguing Figure of the Young Poet
Starting in adolescence he was striking, almost charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, disheveled but good-looking. Prior to he adopted a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could command a room. But, having grown up hugger-mugger with his siblings – three brothers to an cramped quarters – as an mature individual he desired privacy, withdrawing into silence when in groups, vanishing for lonely excursions.
Deep Concerns and Upheaval of Belief
During his era, earth scientists, celestial observers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the origin of species, were posing appalling queries. If the story of living beings had started eons before the arrival of the mankind, then how to believe that the world had been created for humanity’s benefit? “It is inconceivable,” stated Tennyson, “that the whole Universe was only made for us, who live on a insignificant sphere of a common sun.” The recent telescopes and microscopes revealed areas infinitely large and beings tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s belief, given such findings, in a divine being who had made humanity in his form? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then might the human race meet the same fate?
Recurrent Themes: Mythical Beast and Bond
The author ties his account together with a pair of persistent themes. The initial he establishes at the beginning – it is the concept of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a youthful student when he penned his work about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its blend of “Norse mythology, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the biblical text”, the short verse establishes concepts to which Tennyson would repeatedly revisit. Its impression of something enormous, indescribable and tragic, concealed beyond reach of human understanding, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It marks Tennyson’s emergence as a expert of metre and as the originator of symbols in which awful unknown is condensed into a few dazzlingly suggestive phrases.
The additional theme is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the fictional sea monster represents all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his friendship with a actual individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, conjures all that is loving and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson infrequently before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest lines with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a thank-you letter in poetry portraying him in his flower bed with his domesticated pigeons perching all over him, planting their ““pink claws … on arm, hand and lap”, and even on his head. It’s an picture of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s significant celebration of hedonism – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the superb foolishness of the two poets’ mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the mournful renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “nocturnal birds and a hen, four larks and a small bird” constructed their nests.
