# Enoch Arden — Poetry character guide

> Enoch Arden in Poetry by Ambrose Bierce.

**Role:** supporting

**Also known as:** The New Enoch Arden, Enoch

**First appearance:** 0000-poetry

## Snapshot

A reimagining of Tennyson's castaway husband, returned to a world that has moved on — Bierce's vehicle for testing whether patience and virtue still pay.

## Who they are

Bierce takes the familiar figure of the long-lost sailor and sets him down in a landscape of graveyards, scarecrows, and epitaphs, where the dead are catalogued and the living are mostly schemers. The 'New' Enoch Arden must reckon with a world that has little use for the old pieties, and the poem's grim humor turns on whether his return is a triumph or a joke. He matters because he lets Bierce ask, in the middle of the collection, whether faithfulness is a virtue or merely a longer way of being forgotten.

## In the story

### [The New Enoch Arden](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_se/chapters/the-new-enoch-arden)

The able seaman who is cast away on an island and returns home after many years.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_se/characters/enoch_arden
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_se/characters