I’ve mentioned in the past that I learned to read at a ridiculously early age. Today’s prompt fits right in with this fact as the first poem that totally grabbed by imagination did so when I was five. It was Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman. What wildly imaginative child wouldn’t have been captured by, “The Moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.”
This poem now has been read, reread, and spoken aloud to children of two more generations. Decades later my eyes still widen waiting for what happens next with Tim the ostler lurking in the dark ready to betray the lovers, the laughing, crude redcoats bent on capturing the highwayman, and it still captures me every time in the telling of the repetitive:
Look for me by moonlight
Wait for me by moonlight
I’ll come to thee by moonlight
Though hell should bar the way
One of the great Celtic singers of our time, Lorena Mckennit has recorded a musical version. If you know the poem, enjoy. If you have never met the Highwayman or “Bess the landlord’s black eyed daughter”, settle back ready to shiver at
“Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!”
and their ghostly story that now has been repeating every night for more than a century.
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.
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