The Sea Inside. Philip Hoare

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      They may be scared by clouds, but wheatear are bold birds, hopping close to my feet. To Derek Jarman, walking in Dungeness where he had retreated to his tar-black Prospect Cottage, and where he gathered holy stones for friends to wear around their necks as though to protect them from the nearby nuclear reactor, ‘the snobbish wheatears complain – tch! tch!’ But Tennyson heard them differently –

       The wheatears whisper to each other:

       What is it they say? What do they there?

      – as he pounded the island’s downs in his military cape and broad-brimmed hat and oath-catching beard.

      Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire in 1809. ‘Before I could read,’ he remembered, ‘I was in the habit on a stormy day of spreading my arms to the wind, and crying out “I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind.”’ He was a poet attuned to nature in what we consider to have been an age of science and industry. Yet the era itself was wild and prophetic, as filled with female Christs and millenarians as it was with evolutionists and industrialists; as much concerned with myth and mortality and looking backwards as it was with moving into the future.

      Tennyson’s most famous work, In Memoriam, was a tribute to his handsome young friend Arthur Hallam, for whom he had ‘a profound affection’ and who died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of twenty-two:

       Forgive my grief for one removed,

       Thy creature, whom I found so fair.

      When the poem was published in 1850, many readers thought these lines must have been written by a woman. To Tennyson, Hallam had become conflated with the young hero of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, the inspiration for his own Idylls of the King, which in turn Julia Margaret Cameron re-imagined in her dreamy photographs. Their Isle of Wight was a new Albion, clad in its white cliffs, as if its downs and beaches were a concentration of all that Britain represented. After all, the entire empire was overseen from this sliver of southern England, floating in the Channel like Lyonesse, the mythic isle where Arthur was said to have died. A few miles from Freshwater, in her island fastness of Osborne, Victoria, who would lose her own prince to typhoid, pronounced the poem to be her favourite work of literature after the Bible.

      Yet Tennyson’s romantic sentiments were not quite as they seemed. His words expressed the overturning of old certainties in the age of Darwin’s discoveries:

       Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

       With ravine, shriek’d against his creed.

      The way that nature was seen was being overturned. In 1844, Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published anonymously, and sensationally, addressing the idea of the transmutation of species. It was avidly received, not least by Tennyson, who acknowledged that it explored theories he himself had addressed in his work, and by Prince Albert, who read it aloud to the Queen. As Tennyson was drifting into his Arthurian Idylls, Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species in a hotel on the same island. It was as if the world were being reordered here, at England’s outer limits.

      ‘The far future has been my world always,’ Tennyson said. He retreated to Farringford, his house in Freshwater, and retitled his portrait by Julia Margaret Cameron ‘the dirty monk’. But he soon realised that nature could not protect him; that despite the woods around his house and the buttresses of the sea and its raven-haunted ravines, he was also surrounded by his words, as ensnared as a wheatear, unable to escape the place he had assumed in the imperial pantheon. By 1869 the sightseers had become too much, and Tennyson left Farringford for Surrey, where, twenty years later, he would receive the news that his son had died at sea on his way back from India.