The Highwayman

“The Highwayman” opens with vivid and haunting imagery personifying natural elements: The wind moves like “a torrent of darkness” (Line 1) among the trees, the moon is “a ghostly galleon” (Line 2) being tossed like a ship among the fast-moving clouds in the night sky, and the road stretches out like “a ribbon of moonlight” (Line 3) across purple hills. These natural elements come to life through such vivid metaphors, suggesting the danger, beauty, and adventure of the love to come in the following stanzas. Emerging from these romantic natural elements, the Highwayman himself appears, directly riding to his love.

In the second stanza, the highwayman is described as well-dressed and glamorous. He has a “French cocked-hat” (Line 7) and “lace at his chin” (Line 7), along with a coat in a rich, almost blood-like shade of “claret velvet” (Line 8), and breeches made of soft “brown doe-skin” (Line 8) with “never a wrinkle” (Line 9). In short, the hero of the poem is elegant and stylish and Noyes plays with the repeated sounds of “with a jeweled twinkle” (Line 10), “His pistol butts a-twinkle” (Line 11), and “His rapier hilt a-twinkle” (Line 12) as the highwayman rides under a similarly “jeweled sky” (Line 12). This description of the hero first gives the impression he is a successful bandit. Secondly, he appears almost like a demi-god, sparkling like the sky from which he seems to have emerged. Thirdly, the stanza serves to make this common thief likeable: He literally twinkles with elegant beauty and is described as a dashing outlaw. Early in the poem, Noyes flips the reader’s presumed allegiance; here, the King’s men become the enemy because the reader is already on the side of the thief.

If the hero is a thief, who has he come to rob? When the highwayman arrives in town, he heads straight for the inn where Bess is waiting for him. It is “locked and barred” (Line 14) against intruders, but she opens her window to him. The reader can see he has already stolen her heart; they have a secret signal already in place (he whistles a tune to her) and she is “plaiting a dark red love-knot” (Line 18) into her hair in anticipation of his arrival. Stanza three establishes the theme of their forbidden love, as she is pictured as accessible and welcoming but just out of reach.

Noyes describes Bess with the idealized, luxurious, and mysterious language of romantic poetry: She is black-eyed (Line 16), red-lipped (Line 23), and has “long black hair” (Line 18) falling like a “black cascade of perfume” (Line 34) to the highwayman. Connecting her to the highwayman, she braids a red ribbon into that long black hair, recalling the “ribbon of moonlight” (Line 3) stretched out across the moors bringing him to her. They have a chaste encounter: He only kisses her hair since he cannot reach her and promises to come back for her in the morning with the gold he plans to steal that night. Here, the forbidden love is infused with longing, for it is sensual and passionate—his face “burnt like a brand” (Line 32) in anticipation of a kiss from her—but it remains virginal and respectable, as he is satisfied by simply kissing her hair.

Contrasting this honest and true love, Tim the ostler bitterly listens to their exchange; he is the hidden threat of stanza four. He too “loved the landlord’s daughter” (Line 22) and is mad with jealousy. Tim is described quite differently than the highwayman: He face is “white and peaked” (Line 20), with hollowed eyes and “hair like moldy hay” (Line 21). While the highwayman twinkles in the moonlight, Tim lurks among the stables and listens “dumb as a dog” (Line 24) to their exchange. Tim’s appearance introduces a conflict in the poem, shifting the tone from romantic to ominous and threatening their love. Noyes structures the poem so the reader views the romantic exchange through Tim’s eyes: The reader is aware that the encounter is being observed and threatened as Part One ends and the highwayman rides off to his robbery.

When Part Two begins, Bess awaits the return of her love. Tim informed the authorities that the highwayman will come back for Bess, and King George’s red-coat troop marches down the road to the inn to set a trap for the highwayman. The red coats may represent authority, but they are unruly and disrespectful in contrast to the highwayman, who is a gentleman with Bess. They drink the landlord’s ale and “gag[] his daughter” (Line 44), forcibly tying her to the foot of the bed. They make “many a sniggering jest” (Line 49), pointing the muzzle of a musket under her breast and, with bitter irony, they kiss her when her own beloved could not. Meanwhile, they lurk like “death at every window” (Line 46), and she knows the highwayman is doomed.

In this second part of the poem, the narrator shifts perspectives to Bess’s struggle to break free of her bondage and warn her love of the impending doom. She hears his voice in her head, knowing he will be coming to her that evening, and struggles against the knots of the ropes on her wrists (ironically recalling the love knot in her hair). At midnight, her finger finds the trigger of the musket, and the reader feels her relief: “[T]he trigger at least was hers!” (Line 60) While she cannot escape, at least she can save him—even if it means her own death. When she can hear him galloping over the hill in the quiet of the night, she makes her sacrifice and “shatter[s] her breast in the moonlight” (Line 78), warning him with her death. Her heroic death is the climax of the story, and a turning point in the poem. She undermines the guards and counters Tim’s betrayal with her loyalty, but at the cost of her own life.

While Bess “died in the darkness” (Line 84), the highwayman’s death is exposed to the light of day. His madness causes him to lash out the next morning with his “rapier brandished high” (Line 86), and after the red coats shoot him on the highway, the reader sees his once-twinkling spurs soaked with his blood in the bright light of “the golden noon” (Line 87). Noyes’s narrator does not shy away from the violence and tragedy of the lovers’ deaths, and the harsh sun exposes the cruelty of the King’s men’s justice: The once godlike hero is now shot down “like a dog on the highway” (Line 89), recalling the earlier description of Tim, his betrayer, who is “dumb as a dog” (Line 24). Similarly, Bess’s romanticized self-sacrifice violently “shattered her breast” (Line 78) and the possibility of their love.

In the last two stanzas of Part Two, the highwayman’s death completes the tragedy and signifies how their love can be classified. While he could have escaped and lived, as she wished him do, he is driven mad with grief and essentially is driven to his own death when he confronts the red coats on the road. Through their mutual sacrifice, their love is solidified as idealized passion, recalling the deaths of Romeo and Juliet where love is so profound the lovers cannot continue without one another. However, the resolution of the action itself is told with realistic and harsh violence, as the tragic hero lies dead “like a dog” (Line 89) on the highway.

And yet, in the two stanzas of the coda (concluding passage) of “The Highwayman,” love outlives the tragedy of death. This is the promise of idealized love surviving despite separation and death. Noyes ties the couple’s eternal love back to the beginning of the poem when the relationship had perfect potential. That ideal love is intertwined with elements of nature, as the lovers only appear when the night, the moon, and the winds are the same in that perfect moment between them. As ghosts, they replay their chaste encounter, which was never compromised by the scandal of a young woman running away with a bandit, nor the very real forced kisses from the soldiers. In their repeated encounter as ghosts, their love remains eternal, pure, and virginal—transcending and conquering Tim’s mad jealousy or the King’s men cruelty.