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.
Background
Literary Context: Romanticism
English romanticism as a literary movement well preceded Noyes’s era, which peaked in the early half of the 19th century. However, Noyes was a great admirer of 19th-century poets such as Alfred Tennyson and William Wordsworth, and he was highly influenced by the romantic movement. “The Highwayman” was written early in his career, which was marked by Noyes’s interest in capturing the wonder of childhood and dreamlike imagery. His early poetry, like “The Highwayman,” is noted by strong romantic elements such as a reverence for the natural world (as seen in the lush descriptions of the moonlight night), the idealization of physical and emotional passion (as demonstrated in the doomed but idealized relationship between lovers), and an interest in the mystical and supernatural (as seen in the haunting images of Bess and the Highwayman after their deaths). Furthermore, romanticism often idealizes a woman; while the poem is named for the highwayman, the central figure of the poem is a beautiful and loyal young woman, who is not only the love object, but who makes the ultimate sacrifice to save her beloved’s life.
Written when Noyes was still a young man, the poem reflects what he described as his honest interest in the aforementioned themes; this engagement with the romantic and mystical helped him remain extremely popular among the reading public throughout his career. However, Noyes’s work typically refuses the innovation of his contemporaries: “The Highwayman” does not clearly fit with the work of his Edwardian contemporaries, and his later work refuses the unstructured and unpredictable style of the modernist movement.
Social Context: Common Folk Lives
In tandem with the more romantic themes, Noyes’s poem draws from folk traditions and themes to ground his story in the concept of the common man. Noyes’s choice to write “The Highwayman” like a lyrical folk ballad reflects the influence of the romantic era’s interest in folk tales. In the early 19th-century, authors like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth were inspired by the folk traditions and made their own innovations, adapting the ballad form to their own poetry. The influence of the folk ballad can be seen in Noyes’s work, as it narrates a romance between commoners in a little village, nestled among the windswept English moors.
The author writes with a characteristic lyrical simplicity typical of his work, as well as a linguistic familiarity making the poem accessible to most readers. The topic is accessible too: Rather than write about the rich and famous, Guinevere and Arthur, or even Romeo and Juliet, Noyes’s protagonists are from the lower class and come into conflict with the authority of the King. In this way, like his Edwardian counterparts, Noyes’s work is somewhat subversive to the complacent Victorian themes of the previous generation that did not seek liberation from society’s rules: His heroes are a common thief and a village landlord’s daughter, who are essentially destroyed by the Royal authority. However, in “The Highwayman,” the tale concludes that the common people—by their close ties to the power of the natural (and supernatural) worlds—are given spiritual freedom in the end through a love transcending any authority.
