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Enoch Arden

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For other uses, see Enoch Arden (disambiguation).

Illustration for "Enoch Arden" in The Leisure Hour (1864)

Enoch Arden is a narrative poem published in 1864 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, during his tenure as England's poet laureate. The story on which it was based was provided to Tennyson by Thomas Woolner. The poem lent its name to a principle in law that after being missing a certain number of years (typically seven), a person could be declared dead for purposes of remarriage and inheritance.[1]

Background

Enoch Arden (watercolour painting by George Goodwin Kilburne)

The hero of the poem, fisherman turned merchant sailor Enoch Arden, leaves his wife Annie and three children to go to sea with his old captain, who offers him work after he had lost his job due to an accident; in a manner that reflects the hero's masculine view of personal toil and hardship to support his family, Enoch Arden left his family to better serve them as a husband and father. However, during his voyage, Enoch Arden is shipwrecked on a desert island with two companions; both eventually die, leaving Arden alone there. This part of the story is reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe. Enoch Arden remains lost and missing for at least eleven and half years. This is all referenced in the text of the work. It is after ten years that Phillip Ray asks Annie to marry him, stating that it is obvious Enoch is dead. Phillip states this is obvious not only because Enoch has not returned, but there has been no word. It was not unusual for merchant boats in 18th century England (indicated by the fact that Tennyson states at the beginning of the poem that the children played together 100 years prior to the story.) often stayed away for months and even years. However, in port towns as described in this work, there was always some rumor of the ship's whereabouts since this was common work for men who lived in such places. At the time that Phillip proposes to Annie (ten years after Enoch has been missing) Annie gets Phillip to agree to wait a year. A year passes, and Phillip proposes to Annie again. She puts him off for what is described in the text as another "half-year." At this point Annie goes to bed reading her Bible and asks for a sign as to whether Enoch is dead or alive, she dreams of Enoch being on a desert island and misinterprets this as him being in heaven. They marry and have a child.

He finds upon his return from the sea that, after his long absence, his wife, who believed him dead, is married happily to another man, his childhood friend Philip (Annie has known both men since her childhood, thus the rivalry), and has a child by him. Enoch's life remains unfulfilled, with one of his children now dead, and his wife and remaining children now being cared for by his onetime rival.

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 story could be considered a variation on and antithesis to the classical myth of Odysseus, who, after an absence of 20 years at the Trojan War and at sea, found a faithful wife who had been loyally waiting for him. The use of the name Enoch for a man who disappears from the lives of his loved ones is surely 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,[2] and denotes Tennyson's ability to insert theological intentions into simple elegiac mode with an unprecedented complexity in English literature.[3]

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.[4][5] In 2010, Chad Bowles and David Ripley released a CD. 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.[6]

The poem is also the basis of the opera of the same name [de] by composer Ottmar Gerster and librettist Karl von Levetzow [de], which had its premiere in Düsseldorf on 15 November 1936.

See also

References

  1. ^ "Enoch Arden Doctrine".
  2. ^ Pietro De Luigi. Tracce per navigare nell'universo di Enoch Arden (2014 ed.). CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
  3. ^ Maria Serena Marchesi. Temi cristiani nell'opera poetica di Alfred Tennyson (2007 ed.). Congedo Editore.
  4. ^ Platt, Russell (25 November 2007). "Gould Standard". The New Yorker. Retrieved 15 August 2013.
  5. ^ Peter Vidani (2 June 2013). "Freezing Tumblr". Papyh.tumblr.com. Retrieved 15 August 2013.
  6. ^ Reinthaler, Joan (10 September 2010). "Emil de Cou conducts dramatic 'Enoch Arden' by Virginia Chamber Orchestra". Washington Post. Retrieved 28 September 2010.
  7. ^ M. O. Grenby; Andrea Immel (10 December 2009). The Cambridge Companion to Children's Literature. Cambridge University Press. pp. 219–. ISBN 978-1-139-82804-8.
  8. ^ Leonee Ormond (17 November 2016). The Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Europe. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 52–. ISBN 978-1-350-01253-0.
  9. ^ James D. Bloom (2009). Hollywood Intellect. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 123–. ISBN 978-0-7391-2924-1.
  10. ^ a b Mikhail Iampolski (26 October 1998). The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film. University of California Press. pp. 93–. ISBN 978-0-520-08530-5. 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.
  11. ^ "22 Anne of Windy Poplars / Anne of Windy Willows 1936", The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 334–339, 31 December 2014, doi:10.3138/9781442660861-026, ISBN 9781442660861, retrieved 12 August 2022
  12. ^ 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 ...
  13. ^ Time Inc (13 May 1940). LIFE. Time Inc. pp. 55–.
  14. ^ Mark Campbell (26 June 2015). Agatha Christie: The Books, the Films and the Television Shows featuring Poirot, Miss Marple and More. Oldcastle Books. pp. 27–. ISBN 978-1-84344-424-4.
  15. ^ Agatha Christie; Tony Medawar (1997). While the Light Lasts and Other Stories. HarperCollins. pp. 178–. ISBN 978-0-00-232643-8. 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 ...
  16. ^ 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) ...
  17. ^ a b Leslie Halliwell (November 1988). Halliwell's filmgoer's companion: incorporating The filmgoer's book of quotes and Halliwell's movie quiz. Grafton. pp. 236–. ISBN 978-0-246-13322-9. 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).
  18. ^ Greg M. Colón Semenza; Bob Hasenfratz (21 May 2015). The History of British Literature on Film, 1895-2015. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 332–. ISBN 978-1-62356-187-1.
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