22 pages • 44 minutes read
Alfred NoyesThe Highwayman
Fiction | Poem | Middle Grade | Published in 1906A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Nature of Love
With “The Highwayman,” Noyes explores love, illustrating a form of idealized devotion, but exploring the danger of love as well. At the heart of the poem is the love between Bess and the highwayman: They secretly court by night and although the highwayman is a bandit, he nonetheless behaves like a gentleman, kissing her hair as he cannot reach her lips. This flirtation later becomes deadly when their love is put to the test. Bess is willing to die to save her beloved, just as the highwayman essentially dies by suicide of grief, as he attacks the troops with no real hope of defeating them. Their love is defined by passion, loyalty, and immortality, as they are last pictured forever bound together as ghosts trapped in their final moments together. This idealized love is eternal; it is more powerful than the King’s authority and even death—forever tied to the moors, the moon, and the road on which the highwayman lived his life.
However, while Noyes romanticizes love in the first part of the poem and explores the depth of that love in the second part, he likewise tempers such idealization with the danger love poses. Love makes the couple vulnerable and desperate to hold on to their love in the face of loss. Likewise, love—and more specifically passion—drive men to madness. As the lovers meet in secret, Tim the ostler lurks nearby, listening. The narrator notes, “his eyes were hollows of madness” (Line 21) for he “loved the landlord’s daughter” (Line 22). He is mad because he loves Bess, and his jealousy drives him to find a way to dispose of his romantic rival.
By the end of the poem, even Tim has lost the game of love. But like Tim, passion and grief for Bess drives the highwayman to lose reason, transforming a savvy bandit into a heartbroken “madman, shrieking a curse at the sky” (Line 85) as he rides toward his death. When put in a desperate position, only Bess manages to make a clear decision in the moment, knowing exactly how she can save her love, even though it comes at the expense of her own life. For Noyes’s protagonists, the power of love is eternal, but like highway robbery, it is played with the highest stakes.
Love, Interrupted
The problem of love interrupted is a multifaceted theme of “The Highwayman.” Like the untimely deaths of Romeo and Juliet, the beauty and the tragedy of Bess and the highwayman’s love is partially that it is incomplete and frozen in time. On one hand, it is tragic that the lovers do not get to run off and experience life together. On the other, their interrupted love—now frozen in time at the height of their passion—is what makes the poem so effective as a romantic text. What would have happened if he had safely returned to her? Would they have disappeared together, causing a scandal? Would their ideal love lose its luster with children or aging? Did they even get a chance to kiss on the lips? This last question recalls the poem by English romantic poet John Keats, “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” which Noyes would have known. In the poem, two lovers drawn on an urn are frozen in time as they move to kiss, and while there is tragedy in the kiss never being completed, Keats explains that the beauty of the woman will never fade and the potential of that perfect moment is forever captured. Like his predecessor, Noyes offers a similar description with the incomplete love story between Bess and the highwayman. The two will never grow old and as ghosts on the moors, they will forever enjoy their last, most romantic encounter together before “real life” changed their relationship.
In a poem with many dark parallels throughout, the appearance of Tim the ostler is another, bitter manifestation of this theme. His unrequited love drives him to a sort of madness as he betrays Bess and reports the highwayman’s whereabouts to the King’s men. In a reverse of the image of two ghosts forever united in their love, Tim’s recompense will be that his desire will never see fruition, and worse, he will live the rest of his life haunted by the knowledge that his actions led to the death of “the landlord’s red-lipped daughter” (Line 23). Noyes’s poem takes a theme like the eternal longing for love and examines it from multiple perspectives through the lens of the tragic love story.
Self-Sacrifice
Self-sacrifice is a central theme of the poem and serves as the primary turning point for the action. When Bess is taken hostage by the guards and is unable to warn the highwayman of her captivity, she finds one way of saving his life—at the expense of her own. She is faced with a crucial choice when her hand finds the trigger of the musket, but her love for her betrothed is so true that the decision was already made. As Noyes writes, “The trigger at least was hers!” (Line 60), and the reader can see that she is at least relieved to have a way to save him, even if it means killing herself. In fact, this fact calms her: “[S[he strove no more for the rest” (Line 61), and with steely resolve accepts that this is what she must do. In the moment of truth, she does not hesitate, but waits for the exact instant when she knows he will hear the gunshot to pull the trigger.
Bess’s sacrifice saves the highwayman’s life, but in the end, her hope that he will survive her is futile, for his self-sacrifice is also necessary in a tale of idealized love. If the highwayman were to ride away as Bess intended him to do, it would be a much different poem. The reader might question the depth of his love for her, and subsequently the necessity of her sacrifice, which though achieving its purpose would be less romantic and more pragmatic. Instead, the highwayman embraces his death as he tries to avenge hers in an uneven fight; loyalty to each other annihilates them both, but ironically offers them an eternity together. As Noyes depicts it, the sacrifice each lover makes for the other comes quickly and naturally from a place of passion and grief, like the instinct of love in its purest form.
