Alfred Tennyson was known as a divided individual. He produced a verse titled The Two Voices, wherein two facets of the poet argued the merits of self-destruction. In this illuminating work, the author chooses to focus on the more obscure character of the writer.
A Defining Year: The Mid-Century
In the year 1850 was pivotal for Alfred. He published the significant collection of poems In Memoriam, on which he had worked for close to a long period. Therefore, he grew both famous and wealthy. He wed, following a extended relationship. Before that, he had been residing in temporary accommodations with his mother and siblings, or staying with unmarried companions in London, or residing in solitude in a rundown house on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate shores. Now he took a residence where he could entertain distinguished callers. He assumed the role of the official poet. His career as a celebrated individual began.
Even as a youth he was commanding, even charismatic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but good-looking
Family Challenges
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, suggesting inclined to emotional swings and melancholy. His paternal figure, a hesitant priest, was angry and frequently drunk. There was an occurrence, the facts of which are obscure, that resulted in the family cook being burned to death in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was admitted to a lunatic asylum as a youth and lived there for his entire existence. Another experienced deep melancholy and emulated his father into addiction. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of paralysing sadness and what he called “strange episodes”. His Maud is told by a madman: he must regularly have questioned whether he could become one personally.
The Compelling Figure of Early Tennyson
From his teens he was imposing, verging on magnetic. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome. Prior to he started wearing a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could dominate a room. But, maturing crowded with his family members – three brothers to an attic room – as an mature individual he sought out solitude, withdrawing into silence when in groups, retreating for lonely journeys.
Deep Concerns and Turmoil of Faith
During his era, geologists, astronomers and those scientific thinkers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the biological beginnings, were introducing disturbing queries. If the timeline of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the arrival of the human race, then how to hold that the planet had been formed for mankind's advantage? “One cannot imagine,” noted Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was only made for humanity, who reside on a third-rate planet of a common sun.” The modern optical instruments and magnifying tools exposed areas immensely huge and beings infinitesimally small: how to maintain one’s belief, considering such evidence, in a God who had formed man in his own image? If dinosaurs had become extinct, then would the humanity do so too?
Recurrent Themes: Kraken and Friendship
Holmes binds his story together with two recurrent elements. The initial he presents early on – it is the image of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he wrote his verse about it. In Holmes’s perspective, with its combination of “ancient legends, 18th-century zoology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the brief sonnet establishes ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, unutterable and mournful, submerged out of reach of human understanding, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s debut as a master of metre and as the author of metaphors in which dreadful unknown is compressed into a few brilliantly indicative phrases.
The other theme is the contrast. Where the fictional beast epitomises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his relationship with a real-life individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, summons up all that is fond and lighthearted in the writer. With him, Holmes presents a facet of Tennyson rarely known. A Tennyson who, after reciting some of his most impressive phrases with ““bizarre seriousness”, would suddenly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a thank-you letter in verse depicting him in his rose garden with his pet birds resting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on arm, wrist and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of joy perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s notable celebration of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the excellent absurdity of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be learn that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the inspiration for Lear’s rhyme about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “a pair of owls and a hen, four larks and a wren” constructed their dwellings.
