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The Highwayman Essay

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“Then look for me by moonlight, Watch for me by moonlight, I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way.” That is a quote from the poem “The Highwayman.” The poet that wrote this poem was Alfred Noyes. This poem starts out with a highwayman visiting his love Bess at her father's inn.He promises that he'll be back by the next night at the latest.The next evening, instead of the highwayman, some British soldiers show up. These guys are real jerks. They tie up Bess, and then they wait at the windows to shoot the highwayman when he comes back. Bess is tied up with a gun at her chest, and she wriggles around until she has her finger on the trigger. Then, when she hears the highwayman's horse, she fires the gun, and gives her life to warn him about the soldiers.The highwayman tries to get away, but it doesn't work. He gets mowed down by the soldiers in the middle of the road, and dies in a pool of blood. They are together in the afterlife. My claim about this poem is that it is a masterpiece poem because there are many uses of poetic devices. I rate this poem a 8.5. Even though it did not have all the poetic devices in the poem, it had most of them. …show more content…

There are similes in this poem like “dumb as dog he listened” and “ hair like moldy hay”. There are also metaphors such as “the wind was a torrent of darkness” and “the road was a ribbon of moonlight”.

Another reason I feel it is a masterpiece poem is because it has a lot of imagery such as “the landlord’s black-eyed daughter, bess, the landlord’s daughter, Plaiting a dark red love knot into her long black hair.” This stanza causes me to imagine what she looked like. It also has a lot of descriptive words. Descriptive words make the poem not so blah. Some of my favorite descriptive words he used were “tawny”, “his eyes were hollows of madness”, “writhed her

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