Enoch Arden

“Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm;

And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands…”



Enoch Arden is a narrative poem published in 1864 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, during his tenure as England's poet laureate.


Merchant sailor Enoch Arden leaves his wife Annie and three children to go to sea. 


Enoch is shipwrecked on a desert island with two companions; both eventually die, leaving Arden alone. 


He remains lost and missing for more than ten years.


Upon his return he finds that after his long absence, his wife, believing him dead, is now happily married to another man, and has a child by him. 


ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809-1892) was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. T. S. Eliot famously described Tennyson as "the saddest of all English poets", whose technical mastery of verse and language provided a "surface" to his poetry's "depths, unto the very abyss of sorrow".