Young Tennyson

One of my birthday presents, and a very welcome one, was Richard Holmes’s The Boundless Deep, the first of a projected two-volume biography of Tennyson. I’ve just started reading it, and am enjoying it hugely. I’ve long been fascinated by the early life of Tennyson, partly because of his connection to a county I (mostly) love, having spent many boyhood holidays there – Lincolnshire – and in particular to the beautiful and little-visited Lincolnshire Wolds. I’ve written before about this ‘Tennyson Country’, on the blog and in this book, and Holmes evokes the young poet’s life there, amid his troubled but brilliant family in the Somersby rectory, beautifully. The first poem quoted in the book is ‘The Kraken’, a strange and unsettling work, written when Tennyson was still a student, and not published until much later –

Below the thunders of the upper deep; Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea, His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee About his shadowy sides: above him swell Huge sponges of millennial growth and height; And far away into the sickly light, From many a wondrous grot and secret cell Unnumber’d and enormous polypi Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green. There hath he lain for ages and will lie Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep, Until the latter fire shall heat the deep; Then once by man and angels to be seen, In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

This was one of the first poems of Tennyson’s that brought me up short in my precocious exploration of Tennyson’s verse, or those portions of it comprehensible to a boy of ten or less. Sometimes, at that stage, it was little more than those sonorous opening lines – ’"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land, "This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon"..., ‘The woods decay, The woods decay and fall...’, ‘The splendour falls On castle walls...’, ‘On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye...’, ‘Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me...’, ‘With blackest moss the flower-pots Were thickly crusted, one and all...’, and of course ‘Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward...’ – but I went deeper into several of the poems. Especially I was quite entranced by ‘In Memoriam’, reading it all through, and even learning parts of it by heart (I had a memory then). If this sounds like precocity, it is nothing to the boy Tennyson, who at the age of seven, Holmes informs us, could recite Horace’s Odes by heart. Not much later, he had Pope’s translation of the Iliad by heart. All of the eleven Tennyson siblings were bookish and wrote poetry: his sister Mary collected ‘132 sonnets and fugitive pieces’, brothers Frederick and Charles were considered serious poets, and altogether eight of them (including Alfred) had their work published in adult life – this despite the ‘fatal inheritance’ that hung over them all, especially the boys: ‘lethargic drifting, disabling depression, alcoholism, mental instability, or simply black spiritual despair’. With all of which Tennyson struggled throughout his early years – and, thanks to poetry, prevailed.