Alfred Noyes
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alfred-noyes 1880 – 1958
Born to Alfred and Amelia Adams Noyes on September 16, 1880, Alfred Noyes grew up in Wolverhampton, England. His father, a grocer and a teacher, taught Noyes Latin and Greek. Noyes attended Exeter College, Oxford, but left before he earned a degree. At the age of twenty-one he published his first collection of poems, The Loom Years (1902), which received praise from respected poets such as William Butler Yeats and George Meredith.
Between 1903 and 1908, Noyes published five volumes of poetry including The Forest of Wild Thyme (1905) and The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907). In his early work, Noyes claimed he was seeking to "follow the careless and happy feet of children back into the kingdom of those dreams which...are the sole reality worth living and dying for; those beautiful dreams, or those fantastic jests." His books were widely reviewed and were published both in Britain and the United States. Among his best-known poems from this time are "The Highwayman" and "Drake." "Drake," which appeared serially in Blackwood's Magazine, was a two-hundred page epic about life at sea. Both in style and subject, the poem shows a clear influence of Romantic poets such as Tennyson and Wordsworth.
In 1907, Noyes married Garnett Daniels. They had three children. His increasing popularity allowed the family to live off royalty checks. In 1914, Noyes accepted a teaching position at Princeton University, where he taught English Literature until 1923. He was a noted critic of modernist writers, particularly James Joyce. Likewise, his work at this time was criticized by some for its refusal to embrace the modernist movement.
In 1922 he began an epic called The Torch Bearers, which was published in three volumes (Watchers of the Sky, 1922; The Book of Earth, 1925; and The Last Voyage, 1930). The book arose out of his visit to a telescope located at Mount Wilson, California and attempted to reconcile his views of science with religion. His wife died in 1926 and Noyes turned increasingly to Catholicism and religious themes in his later books, particularly The Unknown God (1934) and If Judgment Comes (1941). During the World War II, Noyes lived in Canada and America and was a strong advocate of the Allied effort. In 1949, he returned to Britain. As a result of increasing blindness, Noyes dictated all of his subsequent work. His autobiography, Two Worlds for Memory, was published in 1953. Alfred Noyes died on June 25, 1958, and was buried on Isle of Wight.
Alfred Noyes
School/Movements
Romanticism
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John Keats
William Wordsworth
W. B. Yeats
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YEAR TITLE
1906 The Highwayman
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Alfred Noyes
1880–1958
Image of Alfred Noyes
Hum Historical / Alamy Stock Photo
Extraordinarily prolific and decidedly popular among the reading public, Alfred Noyes enjoyed a full-fledged career as a writer and as an intellectual when few people of the era could depend solely on the writing craft to forge a comfortable living. Especially fond of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Wordsworth, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Shakespeare, and adopting much of their style and content, Noyes most often exhibited a style infused with Romanticism and ballad-like simplicity, and his subject matter was usually optimistic and inspired by the natural beauties of the world. Noyes revered the polite formality of traditional English verse and despised the haphazardness and comparative literary disrespect of the modernist movement of the 20th century—especially the work of James Joyce—but some critics chastised his resistance to change and literary evolution.
Despite the fact that critics regarded Noyes as more of a businessman capable of selling his artistic wares than a serious, talented poet, there is no disputing Noyes’s devotion to the written word. Born in 1880, Noyes was the son of a man who had sacrificed a higher education so that his younger brother could attend university. Noyes’s father never abandoned his love of learning, and young Noyes was the beneficiary of his father’s unrequited intellectual pursuits and ideals. His father taught Noyes Latin and Greek, and his academic nurturing secured him a place at Oxford University in 1898, though he left before earning his degree. Nonetheless, his first collection of poetry, The Loom of Years (1902), was published when he was only 21 years old, and received compliments from esteemed poets such as George Meredith and William Butler Yeats. Noyes married Garnett Daniels in 1907, and the couple lived off his royalty checks. That same year they visited the United States for the first time, and were entertained by such impressive company as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s daughters and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sons. Noyes enjoyed notable relationships throughout his life, apparently drinking tea with Theodore Roosevelt in 1919 just hours before his death and meeting privately with premier Benito Mussolini in 1939, just before the start of World War II.
By the age of 30, Noyes had firmly established himself as the most commercially popular poet of his time. According to Margaret B. McDowell in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, he had “produced his first biography, William Morris (1908), and had collected his poems in eight full-length books. ... They were widely reviewed and several were published in both Britain and the United States. ... Thousands of readers bought Noyes’s books of poems, cherished them, and even memorized parts of them.” McDowell cited a comment from a review in a 1907 issue of the Atlantic Monthly that summed up Noyes’s appeal: “There is a proficiency in the workmanship that, coupled with Mr. Noyes’ humorous tenderness in approaching his theme, all but disarms criticism.” However, as the Modernist movement commenced, critics would get harsher and harsher in their reviews of Noyes’s work.
Three different works consistently vie for the claim of being Noyes’s best-known or most-celebrated endeavor. The first is Drake: An English Epic (1906–08), which achieved most of its exposure because of its serialization in Blackwood’s Magazine. Drake was an ambitious work—a 12-book, 200-page epic in blank verse—that poeticized life at sea, a common theme among English prose and poetry and frequently a favorite of Noyes’s.
Another one of Noyes’s frequently referenced work is “The Highwayman,” an atypically somber, violent poem described by Diane Roback and Richard Donahue in Publishers Weekly as being “about a beautiful woman who dies (with her breast ‘shattered ... drenched with her own red blood’) to save her lover, who is, in turn, shot down ‘like a dog on the highway.’” McDowell quoted Noyes as professing to have written “The Highwayman” in two days when he was 24, “the age when I was genuinely excited by that kind of romantic story.”
The third most-frequently cited work is a three-volume work called The Torch-Bearers (1922, 1925, and 1930), which was inspired after a visit in 1917 to a new telescope being installed at Mount Wilson, California. This trilogy was Noyes’s attempt to reconcile science and religion, as it pays homage to progress in astronomy, biology, and other scientific advancements, as well as the theological and philosophical development of the human race. McDowell described the third volume, The Last Voyage, as reflecting “the intensity of Noyes’s theological search for one’s destiny after life on earth and his increased preoccupation with religion following the death of Garnett,” his first wife, who died in 1926. After her death, Noyes joined the Catholic Church, a transition that greatly influenced his later work.
William Lyon Phelps, writing in The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century, referred to Noyes as “one of the most melodious of modern writers, with a witchery in words that at its best is irresistible. ... [H]e has the imagination of the inspired poet, giving him creative power to reveal anew the majesty of the untamed sea, and the mystery of the stars.” His embodiment of lyrical simplicity and classic familiarity masking as chaste intellectualism was the reason his work was appreciated and adored by the masses. Phelps said, “Alfred Noyes understands the heart of a child,” and likened some of his prettier works to “a kind of singing Alice-in-Wonderland.” Because some of his work—particularly “Flower of Old Japan” and “Forest of Wild Thyme”—sought to regard the world through the eyes of a child, Noyes felt he had to qualify his efforts. According to Phelps’s essay, Noyes asked that his youthful poems “not be taken merely as fairy-tales, but as an attempt to follow the careless and happy feet of children back into the kingdom of those dreams which ... are the sole reality worth living and dying for; those beautiful dreams, or those fantastic jests ... for which mankind has endured so many triumphant martyrdoms that even amidst the rush and roar of modern materialism they cannot be quite forgotten.”
Noyes’s autobiography, Two Worlds for Memory, was published in 1953. He died on the Isle of Wight on June 25, 1958.
POEMS BY ALFRED NOYES
At Dawn
The Barrel-Organ
The Highwayman
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MORE ABOUT THIS POET
Region:
At Dawn
The Barrel-Organ
The Highwayman
The Hill-Flowers
Immortal Sails
Niobe
The Old Meeting House
On The Western Fr
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The Highwayman
Rating: ?4.5
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PART ONE
I
THE wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
II
He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;
They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.
III
Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,
And he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred;
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
IV
And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked;
His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,
But he loved the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's red-lipped daughter,
Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say—
V
'One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I'm after a prize to-night,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;
Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way.'
VI
He rose upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair i' the casement! His face burnt like a brand
As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
(Oh, sweet, black waves in the moonlight!)
Then he tugged at his rein in the moonliglt, and galloped away to the West.
PART TWO
I
He did not come in the dawning; he did not come at noon;
And out o' the tawny sunset, before the rise o' the moon,
When the road was a gypsy's ribbon, looping the purple moor,
A red-coat troop came marching—
Marching—marching—
King George's men came matching, up to the old inn-door.
II
They said no word to the landlord, they drank his ale instead,
But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her narrow bed;
Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!
There was death at every window;
And hell at one dark window;
For Bess could see, through her casement, the road that he would ride.
III
They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest;
They had bound a musket beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast!
'Now, keep good watch! ' and they kissed her.
She heard the dead man say—
Look for me by moonlight;
Watch for me by moonlight;
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!
IV
She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!
She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood!
They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years,
Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,
Cold, on the stroke of midnight,
The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!
V
The tip of one finger touched it; she strove no more for the rest!
Up, she stood up to attention, with the barrel beneath her breast,
She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;
For the road lay bare in the moonlight;
Blank and bare in the moonlight;
And the blood of her veins in the moonlight throbbed to her love's refrain.
VI
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horse-hoofs ringing clear;
Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did not hear?
Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,
The highwayman came riding,
Riding, riding!
The red-coats looked to their priming! She stood up, straight and still!
VII
Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!
Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!
Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight,
Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him—with her death.
VIII
He turned; he spurred to the West; he did not know who stood
Bowed, with her head o'er the musket, drenched with her own red blood!
Not till the dawn he heard it, his face grew grey to hear
How Bess, the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.
IX
Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were his spurs i' 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 the bunch of lace at his throat.
X
And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding—
Riding—riding—
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.
XI
Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard;
He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred;
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
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A Prayer In Time Of War
Rating: ?2.9
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Autoplay
The war will change many things in art and life, and among them, it is to be hoped, many of our own ideas as to what is, and what is not, "intellectual."
Thou, whose deep ways are in the sea,
Whose footsteps are not known,
To-night a world that turned from Thee
Is waiting -- at Thy Throne.
The towering Babels that we raised
Where scoffing sophists brawl,
The little Antichrists we praised --
The night is on them all.
The fool hath said . . . The fool hath said . ..
And we, who deemed him wise,
We who believed that Thou wast dead,
How should we seek Thine eyes?
How should we seek to Thee for power
Who scorned Thee yesterday?
How should we kneel, in this dread hour?
Lord, teach us how to pray!
Grant us the single heart, once more,
That mocks no sacred thing,
The Sword of Truth our fathers wore
When Thou wast Lord and King.
Let darkness unto darkness tell
Our deep unspoken prayer,
For, while our souls in darkness dwell,
We know that Thou art there.
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The Admiral's Ghost
Rating: ?3.7
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Autoplay
I tell you a tale to-night
Which a seaman told to me,
With eyes that gleamed in the lanthorn light
And a voice as low as the sea.
You could almost hear the stars
Twinkling up in the sky,
And the old wind woke and moaned in the spars
And the same old waves went by.
Singing the same old song
As ages and ages ago,
While he froze my blood in that deep-sea night
With the things he seemed to know.
A bare foot pattered on deck;
Ropes creaked; then-all grew still,
And he pointed his finger straight in my face
And growled, as a sea-dog will.
'Do 'ee know who Nelson was?
That pore little shrivelled form
With the patch on his eye and the pinned-up sleeve
And a soul like a North Sea storm?
'Ask of the Devonshire men!
They know, and they'll tell you true;
He wasn't the pore little chawed-up chap
That Hardy thought he knew.
'He wasn't the man you think!
His patch was a dern disguise!
For he knew that they'd find him out, d'you see,
If they looked him in both his eyes.
'He was twice as big as he seemed;
But his clothes were cunningly made.
He'd both of his hairy arms alright!
The sleeve was a trick of the trade.
'You've heard of sperrits, no doubt;
Well there's more in the matter than that!
But he wasn't the patch and he wasn't the sleeve,
And he wasn't the laced cocked-hat.
'Nelson was just-a Ghost!
You may laugh! But the Devonshire men
They knew that he'd come when England called,
And they know that he'll come again.
'I'll tell you the way it was
(For none of the landsmen know) ,
And to tell it you right, you must go a-starn
Two hundred years or so.
* * * * * * *
'The waves were lapping and slapping
The same as they are today;
And Drake lay dying aboard his ship
In Nobre Dios Bay.
'The scent of foreign flowers
Came floating all around;
'But I'd give my soul for the smell o' the pitch, '
Says he, 'in Plymouth Sound.
''What shall I do, ' he says,
'When the guns begin to roar,
An' England wants me, and me not there
To shatter 'er fores once more? '
'(You've heard what he said, maybe,
But I'll mark you the p'ints again;
For I want you to box your compass right
And get my story plain.)
' 'You must take my drum', he says,
'To the old sea-wall at home;
And if ever you strike that drum, ' he says,
'Why, strike me blind, I'll come!
''If England needs me, dead
Or living, I'll rise that day!
I'll rise from the darkness under the sea
Ten thousand miles away.'
'That's what he said; and he died;
An' his pirates, listenin' roun'
With their crimson doublets and jewelled swords
That flashed as the sun went down.
'They sewed him up in his shroud
With a round-shot top and toe,
To sink him under the salt-sharp sea
Where all good seamen go.
'They lowered him down in the deep,
And there in the sunset light
They boomed a broadside over his grave,
As meaning to say 'Good night.'
'They sailed away in the dark
To the dear little isle they knew;
And they hung his drum by the old sea-wall
The same as he told them to.
* * * * * * *
'Two hundred years went by,
And the guns began to roar,
And England was fighting hard for her life,
As ever she fought of yore.
''It's only my dead that count, '
She said, as she says today;
'It isn't the ships and it isn't the guns
'Ull sweep Trafalgar's Bay.'
'D'you guess who Nelson was?
You may laugh, but it's true as true!
There was more in that pore little chawed-up chap
Than ever his best friend knew.
'The foe was creepin' close,
In the dark, to our white-cliffed isle;
They were ready to leap at England's throat,
When-O, you may smile, you may smile;
'But-ask of the Devenshire men;
For they heard in the dead of night
The roll of a drum, and they saw him pass
On a ship all shining white.
'He stretched out his dead cold face
And he sailed in the grand old way!
The fishes had taken an eye and his arm,
But he swept Trafalgar's Bay.
'Nelson-was Francis Drake!
O, what matters the uniform,
Or the patch on your eye or your pinned-up sleeve,
If your soul's like a North Sea storm? '
Alfred Noyes
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A Loom Of Years
Rating: ?2.9
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Autoplay
In the light of the silent stars that shine on the struggling sea,
In the weary cry of the wind and the whisper of flower and tree,
Under the breath of laughter, deep in the tide of tears,
I hear the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.
The leaves of the winter wither and sink in the forest mould
To colour the flowers of April with purple and white and gold:
Light and scent and music die and are born again
In the heart of a grey-haired woman who wakes in a world of pain.
The hound, the fawn, and the hawk, and the doves that croon and coo,
We are all one woof of the weaving and the one warp threads us through,
One flying cloud on the shuttle that carries our hopes and fears
As it goes thro’ the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.
The green uncrumpling fern and the rustling dewdrenched rose
Pass with our hearts to the Silence where the wings of music close,
Pass and pass to the Timeless that never a moment mars,
Pass and pass to the Darkness that made the suns and stars.
Has the soul gone out in the Darkness? Is the dust sealed from sight?
Ah, hush, for the woof of the ages returns thro’ the warp of the night!
Never that shuttle loses one thread of our hopes and fears,
As it comes thro’ the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.
O, woven in one wide Loom thro’ the throbbing weft of the whole,
One in spirit and flesh, one in body and soul,
Tho’ the leaf were alone in its falling, the bird in its hour to die,
The heart in its muffled anguish, the sea in its mournful cry,
One with the flower of a day, one with the withered moon
One with the granite mountains that melt into the noon
One with the dream that triumphs beyond the light of the spheres,
We come from the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.
Alfred Noyes
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In my youth I studied this great poet. As he was truly a poetic genius. I think it would improve anybody's poetry to study this fantastic poet same as it does Byron, Keats and Shelley.