Enoch Arden
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
e'nok ar'den, a narrative poem by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1864. Tennyson has written no poem, unless it be The Charge of the Light Brigade, which is so popular with all classes of people as is Enoch Arden. Enoch Arden is a sailor who is shipwrecked,-cast away on an island. After years of loneliness he is rescued, and returns to find his wife married to an old friend. For her sake Enoch does not disclose himself. He dies brokenhearted. The poem is a finished and beautiful picture of humble but heroic lives. The passages descriptive of Enoch's renunciation are pathetic: Now when the dead man come to life beheld His wife his wife no more, and saw the babe Hers, yet not his, upon the father's knee, And all the warmth, the peace, the happiness, And his own children tall and beautiful, And him, that other, reigning in his place, Lord of his rights and of his children's love,- . . . . . He therefore turning softly like a thief, Lest the harsh shingle should grate underfoot, And feeling all along the garden wall, Lest he should swoon and tumble and be found, Crept to the gate, and open'd it, and closed, As lightly as a sick man's chamber door, Behind him, and came out upon the waste. . . . . . Then the third night after this, While Enoch slumber'd motionless and pale, And Miriam watch'd and dozed at intervals, There came so loud a calling of the sea, That all the houses in the haven rang. He woke, he rose, he spread his arms abroad, Crying with a loud voice, "A sail! a sail! I am saved;" and so fell back and spoke no more. So past the strong heroic soul away. And when they buried him the little port Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910, it could claim that no Tennyson poem except "The Charge of the Light Brigade" was "so popular with all classes of people" — a fair statement then, and no longer true now. Enoch Arden has fallen almost entirely out of the school syllabus and the popular anthology, and Tennyson is read today chiefly for "In Memoriam," "Ulysses" and the "Idylls"; the long domestic narrative poems are the part of his output that modern criticism has been least kind to. What has outlived the poem is the name: Richard Strauss set it as a melodrama for speaker and piano in 1897, D. W. Griffith filmed the story more than once in the silent era, and American lawyers still speak of "Enoch Arden" statutes — laws letting the spouse of a person missing for a term of years remarry without penalty. The verse itself, of course, is exactly as Tennyson published it in 1864.
Written for this edition, 2026.