Before I read Enoch Arden, I imagined Tennyson's beliefs to be fairly conventional for his time. He was, after all, Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate.

And yet, reading this long narrative poem from today's perspective, it's hard to imagine that its author was trying to portray Providence as a benevolant force. At best, it might be taken to deny that there is any divine force shaping our lives (which would be my belief); at worst, it might speak of a malicious Deity who delights in tormenting good people with cruel ironies.

The story concerns a woman and two men who were intimate friends as children. When they grow up, the woman marries the rougher of them, Enoch Arden. Perhaps she feels he needs her more than the other, more respectable fellow who also wishes to marry her.

At first Enoch prospers and builds a good life for his wife and family, but then he loses everything, through no fault of his own. He goes to sea as a common sailor, determined to rebuild his family's fortune, but is shipwrecked. He finds himself alone on a desert island where he survives for many years.

What follows has been imitated so many times that it is fairly predictable, though Tennyson's rigorous Victorian verses lend it tragic eloquence. After many years of waiting, certain that Enoch has died, his wife finally agrees to marry the other man, thanks in part to what she takes as a message from God. She and her husband are happy and prosper.

Of course, Enoch is found and returns to his village. No one recongnizes him and, enquiring anonymously after his wife, he learns that she has married his best friend and that the children of both men are living happily in the new family.

Now Enoch, like the other two main characters, is as nearly perfect as anyone can be. This good man determines never to reveal himself and ruin the lives of the others. He lives the rest of his years, mercifully not too many, in a rented room, with no contact at all with those he loves. Eventually his landlady figures out who he is, but keeps his secret until after he dies.

In one of the most wrenching scenes in the poem, Enoch allows himself one surreptitious look through the window of the happy family. A superficial reading of this scene, or the one in which he dies, or any number of others, would give the impression of ripe melodrama. Many readers have objected to the very last line in which we are told that seldom had the village seen as rich a funeral as Enoch's. This is often interpreted as a gesture of consolation, but I contend that it is the opposite. It is the most bitter of ironies.