Last week I finished reading Tennyson's "Enoch Arden." I noticed an extremely small thing about a line in this part:
But Enoch yearn'd to see her [Annie's] face again:What I noticed is the alliteration in line 716: "Haunted and harass'd him." The alliteration between the two verbs further emphasizes their meaning. The beginning H is present in both just like the thought that haunts and harasses Enoch is constantly before him.
"If I might look on her sweet face again,
And know that she is happy." So the thought
Haunted and harass'd him, and drove him forth,
At evening when the dull November day
Was growing duller twilight, to the hill. (lines 713-718)
But that H sound is also present in "him." The haunting and harassing thought has infected him, and this thought gives Enoch life. When he does see Annie (who's now married to Philip) and his children, their happiness moves him to keep his distance. He thinks that his return will be "a blast of doom" that "would shatter all the happiness of the hearth" (lines 765, 766). He prays to God, "Help me not to break in upon her peace" (line 783). He works for himself, "Yet since he did but labor for himself, / Work without hope, there was not life in it [and]... a languor came / Upon him, gentle sickness, gradually / Weakening the man, till he could do no more" (lines 815-816, 819-821). The thought of seeing Annie again keeps him alive throughout his years at sea and his being shipwrecked, but once he resolves himself against seeing her so that he can preserve her happiness, he has nothing left to live for and slowly fades into death.
All of this is illustrated in the infecting alliteration in those few words: "the thought / Haunted and harass'd him."
