Show Notes
In the early 1860s, Tennyson was at the height of his celebrity. His great elegy, In Memoriam (1850), seemed to have captured the spiritual unease of the age, and the first instalment of Idylls of the King came in 1859. But in 1861 he took a break from Arthurian romance to try something different, a narrative poem based on an old yarn about a man who goes missing at sea for more than ten years. Enoch Arden, sold 17,000 copies on its first day of publication. Well into the 20th century it attracted stage and silent film adaptations as well as a musical setting by Strauss, and provided a template for countless stories of long-lost characters returning home.
The decision Enoch makes at the end of the poem, when he finds his wife and children living happily with another man, was widely debated at the time, but Tennyson is careful not to pass judgment on his characters. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the ways in which Tennyson maintains this moral ambivalence through realist touches and a mastery of half-formed emotion, and discuss the effects of the poem’s intricate patterning and biblical resonances.
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