Poem of the Day: ‘The Highwayman’

In addition to the birthday of T.S. Eliot, September saw the birthday of Alfred Noyes (1880–1958). From the publication of his first volume of poetry, “The Loom of Years,” in 1902, Noyes was a well known and successful literary figure in Europe and America. Of his voluminous work only a handful of poems survive in popular memory: “The The Barrel-Organ” (1904), “Drake,” a two-volume epic poem (1906 and 1908), “The Victory Ball” (1920), the epic verse trilogy “The Torch-Bearers” (1922–1930), and the 1952 poem for children, “Daddy Fell into the Pond.” But above them all in popular memory remains today’s Poem of the Day in The New York Sun: “The Highwayman” (1906).

The story of the love of an unnamed stand-and-deliver road thief and Bess, a landlord’s black-eyed daughter, “The Highwayman” pounds forward along in six-foot lines (with broken pentameter as the penultimate lines in each stanza). The dactyls give it a galloping rhythm, with the repetition of words and the parallels of grammatical construction carrying the reader through the story of the brave Bess, who sacrifices her life to warn her love — and the suicidal charge of the highwayman when he learns of her death: “Blood red were his spurs in the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat; / When they shot him down on the highway, / Down like a dog on the highway, / And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.”