Student Question
Analyze the theme of love and marriage in Alfred Noyes’s poem "The Highwayman."
Quick answer:
Alfred Noyes’s poem "The Highwayman" contains 17 rhyming stanzas, each six lines long, split into two sections. The first details the whirlwind romance of the highwayman and innkeeper's daughter, and the second details their demise at the hands of the king's men. The poems embraces romanticized themes of love, bravery and sacrifice, and ultimately intimates marriage as a spiritual rather than physical union. It is especially so when life's cruelties make earthly togetherness impossible.
"The Highwayman," by the English poet Alfred Noyes, was first published in 1906 at a time when British society was at a crossroads. The death of the long-ruling Queen Victoria in 1901 symbolically ended the norm of idyllic country life in favor of mass industrialization, and English society was now faced with vast uncertainty and fear about the future. Moreover, poets like Browning and Tennyson were gone. The country sought new creative blood, which they found in the fresh and engaging works of Noyes.
"The Highwayman" was not especially original in terms of form, using a traditional poetic style in which every stanza is exactly six lines long. It contains unchanging rhyming patterns from one stanza to the next. The pattern involves rhyming lines 1 and 2, lines 4 and 5, and lines 3 and 6, although in lines 4 and 5, he is actually prone to...
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simply reuse the last word twice rather than employing two different words. However, the technique is effective at creating a smooth and entrancing flow.
The poem is also split up into two sections. The first section is specifically
dedicated to the initial romantic interlude between the two characters: the
highwayman and the innkeeper's daughter, Bess. It describes the highwayman's
ride into town, the two meeting, falling in love, and his promising to return
for her at night. The second more tragic section involves the king's men
bounding, kissing and torturing Bess until she is able to get hold of one of
their guns and, upon hearing the highwayman's horse returning, fatally shoots
herself with it as a warning to him. When the highwayman returns, he finds her
dead, cursing and crying to the sky. And then the king's men kill him as
well.
The poem centers on themes of bravery, love and sacrifice, celebrating these
things as romantic ideals in a world otherwise fraught with cruelty, fear and
uncertainty (again, best understood within the historical context of the time).
However, the key to understanding the poem is the final two stanzas, which
intimate that the two lovers were reunited in death, as ghosts, to enjoy the
union they were unable to achieve in life. In Noyes' poem, love and marriage
are literally spiritual ideas that transcend our physical nature and survive
after our bodies have met their end. As such, the poem embraces the
romanticized notion that lovers are sometimes quick to embrace death as a way
to unite when life makes it impossible.
References