22 pages • 44 minutes read
The Highwayman
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Symbols & Motifs
Time: Night, and Day
Noyes structures his poem with particular attention to the time of day and night, down to the minute in some moments. Certainly, the shift between night and day plays into the themes and sets a romantic tone for the lovers’ encounters. However, the precise attention to the time of each action plays an important role in the progress of the poem. The highwayman opens in the dead of night with the village locked up and asleep, except for Bess, himself, and Tim the ostler. After their brief encounter, the highwayman tells Bess that if he is successful, he will return “before the morning light” (Line 26), but if he is pursued, he will return to her by moonlight the next evening.
Stanza seven plays off this structure, for as Bess watches for her lover, he does not return “in the dawning” (Line 37) and “he did not come at noon” (Line 37), so the reader already knows his robbery did not go as he had hoped. Instead, at sunset, “before the rise of the moon” (Line 38), troops appear on the road, arriving as if from “the tawny sunset” (Line 38), representing a different authority openly operating in the light of day (and with the authority of the king). Timing is crucial to the poem, for Tim has communicated to the troops when to expect the highwayman. As such, they wait in ambush, while Bess is tied up as “the hours crawled by like years” (Line 57), adding a timelessness to the moment while she nervously awaits his return.
Noyes offers a precise moment when Bess finds the trigger “on the stroke of midnight” (Line 58), twice repeating the time for dramatic effect. This decisive moment, when she sacrifices herself just after midnight and “her musket shattered the moonlight” (Line 77), is echoed later in the poem when the highwayman is killed 12 hours later “in the golden noon” (Line 87). Here the light of high noon is a blinding juxtaposition to the softness of the moonlight. By the end of the poem, the lovers have passed beyond this temporality to a state of eternal night, meeting as ghosts in an unending moonlight.
Color
The color red appears as a motif throughout the poem, signifying the passion and danger of love. It manifests in a spectrum of shades, from wine or blood-red, to the cool purple shades of the moors or ruddy tawny-red of a sunset. Red commonly symbolizes love and passion, as demonstrated in Part One. By Part Two, it symbolizes death, and danger, as with the “red-coat troop” (Line 40) that seems to come marching out of the “tawny sunset” (Line 38) along a “gypsy’s ribbon” (Line 39). In “The Highwayman” these elements—love and death—are intertwined and the recurring motif of red draws the reader’s attention to these themes. By comparison, the black of Bess’s hair and eyes, and the white of the moon and the road, serve to contrast the brightness of the red and make it stand out.
The image of the “purple moor” (Lines 3, 93) bookmarks the poem, setting a romantic, cool hue to the nighttime encounter between the lovers. The appearance of the highwayman in a “coat of the claret velvet” (Line 8) introduces a much brighter shade of red akin to his burning passion. He has come to see Bess, who is linked to him by a similar shade: She is pictured tying a “red love-knot” (Lines 18, 102) into her hair. During their encounter, red appears on her lips (Line 23), and in anticipation of her kiss when, “[h]is face burnt like a brand” (Line 32), or a glowing, fiery red.
In Part Two, red shifts to signify death when “a red-coat troop came marching” (Line 40) to the inn door. As the tale builds toward their deaths, Bess’s hands are pictured as “wet with sweat or blood” (Line 56), while “the blood of her veins” (Line 66) throbs in anticipation of her sacrifice; ultimately, she is “drenched with her own blood” (Line 80). Similarly, the highwayman is marked by the blood-red of death, as the narrator says, “blood red were his spurs” (Line 90) as the hero “lay in his blood on the highway” (Line 90). By the coda, when the two lovers are ghosts, Noyes returns to those first images of red with Beth’s red love-knot repeated in the final line. This repetition highlights that their love and their deaths are forever tied together, and the recurring motif of red marries these ideas in the final lines of the poem.
Bess’s Hair
Bess’s beauty is a reoccurring motif in the poem, and her hair—alongside her red lips and black eyes—pops out as a vivid symbol in the text. Noyes devotes a whole stanza to it at the height of the lovers’ passionate encounter. Bess is first pictured sitting in the windowsill, “plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair” (Line 18). Here, her hair is being braided and bound with a ribbon, under control, and still respectable. The binding image is cruelly inverted when she is later bound to the bed by ropes. Yet, in this moment her hair recalls the black of nighttime, and symbolizes youth, vitality, and the sensuality of love, as she adorns it with her ribbon.
The highwayman asks for a kiss from his “bonny sweetheart” (Line 25), perhaps pushing the limits of respectability for the period, but he cannot reach her. In stanza six, she loosens her hair from the ribbon, letting it hang freely down to him. While her hair was bound up properly in stanza three, here she lets it hang loose, symbolizing her embrace of this passionate love between them, despite the fact that it is forbidden. The image nods to a fairy tale like “Rapunzel,” and the moment both figuratively and literally links them together. Bess’s hair is a “black cascade of perfume” (Line 33) tumbling over him like dark water, or “sweet black waves in the moonlight” (Line 35). He kisses her waves of hair, and it is enough; the moment is romantic and chaste. After their deaths, she is pictured again in this same way: Despite their tragic end, their love proliferates in the afterlife, now symbolized by the eternal youth and beauty of Bess’s long black hair and the red love-knot she wove into it.
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