The Urban Highway Robber

Classic English poetry meets art deco in illustrator Murray Kimber's interpretation of Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman." The poem is a romantic ballad that, though once required reading for most students, has lately fallen somewhat out of favour. Being "traditional" and "conservative," it seems an offbeat choice for the second volume of KCP Press's "Visions in Poetry" series, but Kimber's moody paintings work well with Noyes's eerie poem.

Despite its old-fashioned romanticism, "The Highwayman" remains a compelling work. It was made into a film in 1951 and Loreena McKennitt set it to music (she recorded many classic poems, including "The Lady of Shalott" and "The Bonny Swans"). Central to its narrative are the unnamed highwayman and his beloved Bess, the inn-keeper's daughter. One night, Tim the ostler--who also loves Bess--hears the lovers plan a tryst after the highwayman steals a "bonny prize" of gold. Tim betrays the highwayman to King George's men, catalyzing an enduring story of sacrifice and immortal love.

The romantic 17th-century English highwayman is reinvented in Kimber's paintings as an American biker, circa 1930s. Kimber updates the poem by illustrating classic imagery in jazz age trappings. Tim the ostler, who in Noyes's narrative hides in a stable, is a sly valet. The highwayman's "French cocked-hat" is now a beret, and the "bunch of lace" at his throat becomes a white scarf. Instead of a horse, he rides a motorcycle emblazoned with a stallion insignia. The ribbon imagery that permeates the poem ("The road was a ribbon of moonlight," "the road was a gypsy's ribbon,") is too ethereal for Kimber's setting. Instead, his highwayman's motorcycle headlight cuts a harsh swath in the urban night. Kimber represents the "ribbon of moonlight" with a moonlit image of the Brooklyn Bridge.

King George's men ambush the highwayman on the evening he is to meet his love at the inn:

"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!"

Kimber updates the King's men with policemen who, clad in trenchcoats and fedoras and armed with rifles and machine guns, are the very picture of 1930s-era government men. Bess knows that her lover is a "dead man" already, but she warns him of the treachery by shooting herself with a musket. Hearing the shot, the highwayman flees, unaware that the blast signalled his lover's death.

Noyes uses colours and metaphors to evoke a highly imagistic story of a doomed love. "The Highwayman" owes much of its power to Noyes's highly descriptive passages. Kimber, on the other hand, uses a limited palate to create a noirish world. Purple moors and ribbon-like roads are replaced by sombre greys and blues, making the rare burst of colour even more dramatic. Bess's "dark red love-knot," her red fingernails and bloody arms, and a bouquet of red roses are all vibrantly hued.

One of Kimber's most moving paintings is that of the highwayman, who has just heard that "Bess...had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there." He crouches in anguish in a seamy room, his "bonny prize" of cash scattered unheeded about him. But he rises with a vengeance, riding back with face uncovered "like a madman" to confront Bess's tormentors. Pistol ready, scarf flowing behind him, he grins wildly, riding headlong to a police shootout.

The nameless hero, like a highwayman or a lone biker, is akin to the American archetype of the 'man with no name' of western movies. He is a romantic figure who alone defies convention and authority, and he almost always dies in a blaze of glory. As proof of the strength of love and the injustice of death, Noyes's description of the highwayman's journey that opened the ballad is repeated at its end, but in the present tense. The highwayman and Bess are no longer of the past; they are spirits eternally reliving their last night together.

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.

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.

Check out this interactive version of "The Highwayman" at Teachers First.