Enoch Arden (excerpt)

Join us for Poetry Aloud (Friday podcasts) this summer, when Dr. Esolen continues to read Huckleberry Finn, chapter by chapter.

Is it possible to be an orphan on both sides of your life, in your childhood and your old age? Seamen knew plenty about the one, and perhaps a little about the other, too. Go to New Bedford, Massachusetts, that onetime capital of seafaring America, the city whence the character Ishmael set out to sea on a ship captained by a fellow named Ahab. Shall we say that it is not a good omen to have a monomaniacal one-legged man named for an apostate king of Israel as your sea captain? Anyway, in New Bedford you will see many large old houses with rooftop balconies, so that someone up there, let us say a wife whose husband is at sea, can look out upon the waters far away, with nothing but the mists and curve of the earth to obstruct her view. Such a balcony was called a widow’s walk, for obvious reasons.

Now, a man who is lost at sea may not be dead. He may have been stranded — literally, he may have washed up on the strand somewhere, the beach, perhaps the beach of an uninhabited island. That is possible. It is behind the plot of Shakespeare’s Tempest, which we have recently featured here at Word and Song, and Shakespeare did not come up with that idea on his own. Some British sailors presumed dead had, one year before Shakespeare wrote the play, been shipwrecked off one of the islands of Bermuda, then uninhabited, and had miraculously survived and gotten back to England. And you may remember what happened to Robinson Crusoe in Defoe’s novel, which gave Jonathan Swift his idea to shipwreck Gulliver hither and yon, to meet Lilliputians and so forth.

And that is what happens to the title character in Alfred Tennyson’s narrative poem, Enoch Arden. The ship goes under, and eleven years pass without anyone hearing a word from Enoch or about him, so that he is presumed dead, under the law. But he is not dead. When he does return at last, he is a much changed man whom nobody recognizes. His wife Annie, who loved him dearly, has married another man, his and her boyhood friend Philip. This Philip is also a good man, perhaps a more self-sacrificing man than Enoch, but shy and retiring, yet always thinking first of Annie’s happiness and that of the children — the first three are Enoch’s, and then Philip and Annie have one of their own. Enoch had been sometimes rough around the edges, but years of suffering have either worn him down, which is one way of looking at it, since he returns stoop-backed and wizened, or built him up, instilling in him a courage and love that are truly heroic. For he does not tell Annie that he is home.

Our Poem of the Week is just the beginning of Enoch Arden. I try to remind my students that, before the advent of the novel, and for a good while afterwards, poets were the great story-tellers of the world, and this was so in every human culture. For you need writing, and then the printing press, to make so unwieldy a thing as the novel possible. In ancient Greece, any rhapsode worth his dinner could recite or chant thousands of lines of Homer’s Odyssey without looking at a cheat-sheet, since that’s the only way, for several centuries, anyone did experience the poem. I don’t believe that the Greeks set it down in writing until the time of Aristotle. In any case, poets told stories, and you could remember them because the poetry was musical: it had order to it. That presumption persisted throughout the nineteenth century, and even, in poets like Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, into the twentieth. And if you want stories in verse, nobody in English was better at it than Alfred Tennyson.

The good poetic storyteller knows that he has to set everything in place early on, so that the poem does not just move from one event to another, as down a path that wanders here and there. Rather it unfolds: the whole story is present at the beginning, in the seed. And that is what you see in these lines that begin Enoch Arden. We have the three main characters as children. We see that Enoch is bigger and more enterprising than Philip. We see a rivalry between the two boys, for Annie’s attention. We see that Annie is sweet, and she loves them both. And Enoch is a sea-orphan: which makes his boyish attachment to Annie more powerful, since he is otherwise lonely, and also more of a trouble to him, since he has no warm and comforting life to fall back upon. This lad will grow up to be an old man who loves dearly and who is loved by no one, at least not until the final scene of the poem. But here, at the beginning, it is Philip who is orphaned: he is the one who will lose his father to illness, and at the same time, apparently, lose all hope for the only woman he could ever love.

A home in New Bedford, topped by a “widow’s walk.”

Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm;
And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands;
Beyond, red roofs about a narrow wharf
In cluster; then a mouldered church; and higher
A long street climbs to one tall-towered mill;
And high in heaven behind it a gray down
With Danish barrows; and a hazelwood,
By autumn nutters haunted, flourishes
Green in a cuplike hollow of the down.
 
Here on this beach a hundred years ago,
Three children of three houses, Annie Lee,
The prettiest little damsel in the port,
And Philip Ray the miller's only son,
And Enoch Arden, a rough sailor's lad
Made orphan by a winter shipwreck, played
Among the waste and lumber of the shore,
Hard coils of cordage, swarthy fishing-nets,
Anchors of rusty fluke, and boats updrawn,
And built their castles of dissolving sand
To watch them overflowed, or following up
And flying the white breaker, daily left
The little footprint daily washed away.
 
A narrow cave ran in beneath the cliff:
In this the children played at keeping house.
Enoch was host one day, Philip the next,
While Annie still was mistress; but at times
Enoch would hold possession for a week:
"This is my house and this my little wife."
'
"Mine too," said Philip, "turn and turn about."
When, if they quarreled, Enoch stronger-made
Was master: then would Philip, his blue eyes
All flooded with the helpless wrath of tears,
Shriek out, "I hate you, Enoch," and at this
The little wife would weep for company,
And pray them not to quarrel for her sake,
And say she would be little wife to both.
 
But when the dawn of rosy childhood past,
And the new warmth of life's ascending sun
Was felt by either, either fixed his heart
On that one girl; and Enoch spoke his love,
But Philip loved in silence; and the girl
Seemed kinder unto Philip than to him;
But she loved Enoch; though she knew it not,
And would if asked deny it.  Enoch set
A purpose evermore before his eyes,
To hoard all savings to the uttermost,
To purchase his own boat, and make a home
For Annie: and so prospered that at last
A luckier or a bolder fisherman,
A carefuller in peril, did not breathe
For leagues along that breaker-beaten coast
Than Enoch.  Likewise had he served a year
On board a merchantman, and made himself
Full sailor; and he thrice had plucked a life
From the dread sweep of the down-streaming seas:
And all men looked upon him favorably:
And ere he touched his one-and-twentieth May
He purchased his own boat, and made a home
For Annie, neat and nestlike, halfway up
The narrow street that clambered toward the mill.
 
Then, on a golden autumn eventide,
The younger people making holiday,
With bag and sack and basket, great and small,
Went nutting to the hazels.  Philip stayed
(His father lying sick and needing him)
An hour behind; but as he climbed the hill,
Just where the prone edge of the wood began
To feather toward the hollow, saw the pair,
Enoch and Annie, sitting hand-in-hand,
His large gray eyes and weather-beaten face
All-kindled by a still and sacred fire,
That burned as on an altar.  Philip looked,
And in their eyes and faces read his doom;
Then, as their faces drew together, groaned,
And slipped aside, and like a wounded life
Crept down into the hollows of the wood;
There, while the rest were loud in merrymaking,
Had his dark hour unseen, and rose and past
Bearing a lifelong hunger in his heart.