Fisherman-turned-merchant sailor Enoch Arden leaves his wife Annie and three children to go to sea with his old captain, having lost his job due to an accident; reflective of a masculine mindset common in that era, Enoch sacrifices his comfort and the companionship of his family in order to better support them. During the voyage, Enoch is shipwrecked on a desert island with two companions who eventually die. (This part of the story is reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe.)[citation needed] Enoch remains lost for eleven and half years. Ten years after Enoch's disappearance,
Phillip Ray asks Annie Arden to marry him, stating that it is obvious Enoch is dead. It was not unusual for 18th century merchant ships to remain at sea for months or years, but there was always news of a ship's whereabouts by way of other ships that had communicated with it. Phillip reminds Annie that there has been no word of Enoch's ship. Annie asks Phillip to agree to wait a year. A year passes, and Phillip proposes to Annie again. She puts him off for another half-year. Annie reads her Bible and asks for a sign as to whether Enoch is dead or alive. She dreams of Enoch being on a desert island which she misinterprets as heaven. She marries Phillip and they have a child.
Enoch finds upon his return from the sea that his wife is married happily to his childhood friend and rival and has a child by him. Enoch's life remains unfulfilled, with one of his own children now dead and his wife and remaining children now being cared for by another man.
Enoch never reveals to his wife and children that he is really alive, as he loves her too much to spoil her new happiness. Enoch dies of a broken heart.
The use of the name Enoch for a man who disappears from the lives of his loved ones is surely[weasel words] inspired by the biblical character Enoch. In fact, also the entire chronological structure of the protagonist's life with its cycles related to the biblical symbolism of the "days of Creation" binds to the name of Enoch, as demonstrated by the analysis of an Italian thinker long interested in this work,[3] and denotes Tennyson's ability to insert theological intentions into simple elegiac mode with an unprecedented complexity in English literature.[4]
Musical settings
In 1897, Richard Strauss set the poem as a recitation for speaker and piano, published as his Op. 38. On 24 May 1962, Columbia Records released a recording of Enoch Arden (recorded 2–4 October 1961) with Glenn Gould on the piano and Claude Rains as the speaker. The LP was made at a cost of $1500, and only 2000 copies were released. It remains a collector's item.[5][6] In 2010, Chad Bowles and David Ripley released a CD, and in 2020 a recording was made in German by pianist Kirill Gerstein and Swiss actor Bruno Ganz.[7]
Conductor Emil de Cou arranged a version for chamber orchestra and narrator. This was performed with the Virginia Chamber Orchestra and actor Gary Sloan in 2010.[8] The British actor Christopher Kent and pianist Gamal Khamis performed a semi-staged livestream performance during the 2020 lockdown and subsequently recorded a critically acclaimed CD for SOMM Recordings, which was released in 2022.[9]
Franklin Wescott in the 1936 novel Anne of Windy Poplars, the fourth book in the Anne of Green Gables series, says, "Those last two lines in Enoch Arden made me so mad one night, I did fire the book through the window. But I picked it up the next day for the sake of the Bugle Song."[14]
Agatha Christie referenced the poem in three stories. "While the Light Lasts", a short story first published in The Novel Magazine in April 1924, has its protagonist Tim Nugent suffer the same chain of events as did Arden.[17] The same plot arc was used, to greater effect, as part of Giant's Bread (1930), the first of six novels written by Christie under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott.[18]. Finally, in the crime novel Taken at the Flood (1948), the character Robert Underhay is lost in the South African bush and presumed dead; A character uses the pseudonym "Enoch Arden" as he attempts to blackmail Underhay's wife Rosaleen and her new family.[19]
^ abMikhail Iampolski (26 October 1998). The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film. University of California Press. pp. 93–. ISBN978-0-520-08530-5. Longford Lyell Productions and Charles Perry produce The Bushwackers. Lottie and Longford are credited with the screenplay and Arthur Higgins once again photographs. The film is loosely based on Tennyson's Enoch Arden.
^Newsweek. Vol. 45. Newsweek. 1955. pp. 104–. This variation on Tennyson's Enoch Arden theme was a thin play when W. Somerset Maugham offered it as "Too Many Husbands" in 1919. It was just as thin, but passing good fun, when Jean Arthur played in a screen version under the same title in 1940. Now, by switching the story to a show-business background, Edward Hope and Leonard Stern get a springboard for a lively musical. This time Mrs. Arden is Betty Grable, a musical-comedy star whose husband. Jack Lemmon, goes ...
^Agatha Christie; Tony Medawar (1997). While the Light Lasts and Other Stories. HarperCollins. pp. 178–. ISBN978-0-00-232643-8. Afterword 'While the Light Lasts' was first published in the Novel Magazine in April 1924. To those familiar with the works of Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson, Arden's true identity will not have come as a surprise. Tennyson was among Christie's favourite poets, together with Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and his Enoch Arden also inspired the Poirot novel Taken at the Flood (1948). The plot of 'While the Light Lasts' was later used to greater effect as part of Giant's Bread (1930), the first of her six novels ...
^Literary Onomastics Studies. Vol. 11–13. State University College. 1984. pp. 17–. ... Charles Trenton in Taken at the Flood uses Enoch Arden (from a Tennyson poem of 1864 in which a stranger does not reveal his identity) ...
^ abLeslie Halliwell (November 1988). Halliwell's filmgoer's companion: incorporating The filmgoer's book of quotes and Halliwell's movie quiz. Grafton. pp. 236–. ISBN978-0-246-13322-9. Enoch Arden was a character in a Tennyson poem who came back to his family after having been long supposed dead. Films with an "Enoch Arden' theme include Tomorrow Is Forever (with Orson Welles), The Years Between (with Michael Redgrave), Too Many Husbands (with Fred MacMurray) and its remake Three for the Show (with Jack Lemmon), My Favorite Wife (with Irene Dunne) and its remake Move Over Darling (with Doris Day).