The Highwayman

This is one of a half-dozen great little books in the Visions of Poetry series, each illustrating a popular poem taking the ballad (narrative) form. I really loved this series when it came out in 2006 and thought each book offered up a wonderful visual interpretation of classic texts. Unfortunately, they didn’t publish any more of them and looking around they seem to be hard to find today.

This instalment has the poem “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes illustrated by Murray Kimber. Like most of the poems in the series, “The Highwayman” has a repetitive, incantatory quality that draws you in right from the famous opening stanza. This is the sort of thing a generation of schoolkids had to commit to memory, and it did them no harm.

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.

The poem is set in the 18^th century but Kimber updates everything so that now the titular desperado is a biker outlaw riding an iron horse with a mustang logo through the canyons of Manhattan, and the king’s soldiers are FBI G-men. That’s quite a leap, but I thought it worked wonderfully well. I also thought Kimber did a good job illustrating the business of Bess the landlord’s luscious daughter being tied up with a musket pointed at her breast. That’s one of those things that’s really hard to visualize, and seeing it illustrated doesn’t make it any more believable, but that’s not on Kimber. I don’t know what Noyes was thinking. Otherwise, I had no trouble buying the outlaw as biker, even if the “tlot-tlot” of the horse’s  hooves in the poem made it seem like his bike had a flat. Noyes’s Highwayman is already a bit of a retro cliché anyway, especially given how he’s armed to the teeth with a rapier, two pistols, and a whip. He’s ready for anything, almost.

Kimber’s obvious influence was film noir and I thought the way the story is told like a storyboard, cutting between extreme close-ups and dramatic architectural settings, was quite effective. But then I was on board with all of his creative decisions here. This is a great book not just for kids but for anyone with a love of poetry.

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