Alfred Noyes

Alfred Noyes was an English poet, short-story writer, and playwright, best known for his ballads, particularly "The Highwayman" (1906). Born on September 16, 1880, in Wolverhampton, he published his first collection of poems, "The Loom of Years," in 1902. His narrative poetry and works often evoked strong imagery and emotion. Noyes also lectured in various universities across the United States. He passed away on June 25, 1958.

September 16, 1880

June 25, 1958

English

Alfred Noyes

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The Chimney-Sweeps Of Cheltenham

When hawthorn buds are creaming white,
    And the red foolscap all stuck with may,
Then lasses walk with eyes alight,
    And it's chimney-sweepers' dancing day.

For the chimney-sweeps of Cheltenham town,
    Sooty of face as a swallow of wing,
Come whistling, singing, dancing down
    With white teeth flashing as they sing.

And Jack-in-the green, by a clown in blue,
    Walks like a two-legged bush of may,
With the little wee lads that wriggled up the flue
    Ere Cheltenham town cried "dancing day."

For brooms were short and the chimneys tall,
    And the gipsies caught 'em these blackbirds cheap,
So Cheltenham bought them, spry and small,
    And shoved them up in the dark to sweep.

For Cheltenham town was cruel of old,
    But...

Alfred Noyes

The Companions

How few are they that voyage through the night
    On that eternal quest,
For that strange light beyond our light,
    That rest beyond our rest.

And they who, seeking beauty, once descry
    Her face, to most unknown;
Thenceforth like changelings from the sky
    Must walk their road alone.

So once I dreamed. So idle was my mood;
    But now, before these eyes,
From those foul trenches, black with blood,
    What radiant legions rise!

And loveliness over the wounded earth awakes
    Like wild-flowers in the Spring.
Out of the mortal chrysalis breaks
    Immortal wing on wing.

They rise like flowers, they wander on wings of light,
    Through realms beyond our ken.
The loneliest soul is companied tonight
    By hosts of u...

Alfred Noyes

The Humming Birds

Green wing and ruby throat,
    What shining spell, what exquisite sorcery,
Lured you to float
    And fight with bees round this one flowering tree?

Petulant imps of light,
    What whisper or gleam or elfin-wild perfumes
Thrilled through the night
    And drew you to this hive of rosy bloom?

One tree, and one alone,
    Of all that load this magic air with spice,
Claims for its own
    Your brave migration out of Paradise;

Claims you, and guides you, too,
    Three thousand miles across the summer's waste
Of blooms ye knew
    Less finely fit for your ethereal taste.

To poets' youthful hearts,
    Even so the quivering April thoughts will fly,--
Those irised darts,
    Those winged and tiny denizens of the sky.

Alfred Noyes

The Little Roads

The great roads are all grown over
    That seemed so firm and white.
The deep black forests have covered them.
    How should I walk aright?
How should I thread these tangled mazes,
    Or grope to that far off light?
I stumble round the thickets, and they turn me
    Back to the thickets and the night.

Yet, sometimes, at a word, an elfin pass-word,
    (O, thin, deep, sweet with beaded rain!)
There shines, through a mist of ragged-robins,
    The old lost April-coloured lane,
That leads me from myself; for, at a whisper,
    Where the strong limbs thrust in vain,
At a breath, if my heart help another heart,
    The path shines out for me again.

A thin thread, a rambling lane for lovers
    To the light of the world's one May,
Where the ...

Alfred Noyes

The Lost Battle

It is not over yet-the fight
    Where those immortal dreamers failed.
They stormed the citadels of night
    And the night praised them--and prevailed.
So long ago the cause was lost
    We scarce distinguish friend from foe;
But--if the dead can help it most--
    The armies of the dead will grow.

The world has all our banners now,
    And filched our watchwords for its own.
The world has crowned the "rebel's" brow
    And millions crowd his lordly throne.
The masks have altered. Names are names;
    They praise the "truth" that is not true.
The "rebel" that the world acclaims
    Is not the rebel Shelley knew.

We may not build that Commonweal.
    We may not reach the goal we set.
But there's a flag they dare not steal.
    Forwar...

Alfred Noyes

The Man Who Discovered The Use Of A Chair

The man who discovered the use of a chair,
    Odds--bobs--
        What a wonderful man!
He used to sit down on it, tearing his hair,
    Till he thought of a highly original plan.
For years he had sat on his chair, like you,
    Quite--still!
        But his looks were grim
For he wished to be famous (as great men do)
    And nobody ever would listen to him.

Now he went one night to a dinner of state
    Hear! hear!
        In the proud Guildhall!
And he sat on his chair, and he ate from a plate;
    But nobody heard his opinions at all;

There were ten fat aldermen down for a speech
    (Grouse! Grouse!
        What a dreary bird!)
With five fair minutes allotted to each,
    But never a moment for him t...

Alfred Noyes

The Matin-Song Of Friar Tuck

I.

If souls could sing to heaven's high King
    As blackbirds pipe on earth,
How those delicious courts would ring
    With gusts of lovely mirth!
What white-robed throng could lift a song
    So mellow with righteous glee
As this brown bird that all day long
    Delights my hawthorn tree.
        Hark! That's the thrush
            With speckled breast
        From yon white bush
            Chaunting his best,
    Te Deum! Te Deum laudamus!


II.

If earthly dreams be touched with gleams
    Of Paradisal air,
Some wings, perchance, of earth may glance
    Around our slumbers there;
Some breaths of may might drift our way
    With scents of leaf and loam,
Some whistling bird at dawn be heard
    From ...

Alfred Noyes

The New Duckling

"I want to be new," said the duckling.
    "O, ho!" said the wise old owl,
While the guinea-hen cluttered off chuckling
    To tell all the rest of the fowl.

"I should like a more elegant figure,"
    That child of a duck went on.
"I should like to grow bigger and bigger,
    Until I could swallow a swan.

"I won't be the bond slave of habit,
    I won't have these webs on my toes.
I want to run round like a rabbit,
    A rabbit as red as a rose.

"I don't want to waddle like mother,
    Or quack like my silly old dad.
I want to be utterly other,
    And frightfully modern and mad."

"Do you know," said the turkey, "you're quacking!
    There's a fox creeping up thro' the rye;
And, if you're not utterl...

Alfred Noyes

The Night Of The Lion

"And that a reply be received before midnight."
British Ultimatum.


Their Day was at twelve of the night,
    When the graves give up their dead.
And still, from the City, no light
    Yellows the clouds overhead.
Where the Admiral stands there's a star,
    But his column is lost in the gloom;
For the brazen doors are ajar,
    And the Lion awakes, and the doom.

He is not of a chosen race.
    His strength is the strength of the skies,
In whose glory all nations have place,
    In whose downfall Liberty dies.
He is mighty, but he is just.
    He shall live to the end of years.
He shall bring the proud to the dust.
    He shall raise the weak to the spheres.

It is night on the world's great mart,
    B...

Alfred Noyes

The Observatory

At noon, upon the mountain's purple height,
Above the pine-woods and the clouds it shone
No larger than the small white dome of shell
Left by the fledgling wren when wings are born.
By night it joined the company of heaven,
And, with its constant light, became a star.
A needle-point of light, minute, remote,
It sent a subtler message through the abyss,
Held more significance for the seeing eye
Than all the darkness that would blot it out,
Yet could not dwarf it.
                        High in heaven it shone,
Alive with all the thoughts, and hopes, and dreams
Of man's adventurous mind.
                            Up there, I knew
The explorers of the sky, the pioneers
Of science, now made ready to attack
That darkness once again, and win new worlds.

Alfred Noyes

The Old Fool In The Wood

"If I could whisper you all I know,"
    Said the Old Fool in the Wood,
"You'd never say that green leaves grow.
    You'd say, 'Ah, what a happy mood
The Master must be in today,
    To think such thoughts,'
That's what you'd say."

"If I could whisper you all I've heard,"
    Said the Old Fool in the fern,
"You'd never say the song of a bird.
    You'd say, 'I'll listen, and p'raps I'll learn
One word of His joy as He passed this way,
    One syllable more,'
That's what you'd say."

"If I could tell you all the rest,"
    Said the Old Fool under the skies,
"You'd hug your griefs against your breast
    And whisper with love-lit eyes,
'I am one with the sorrow that made the may,
    And the pulse of His heart,'
That's what you'd ...

Alfred Noyes

The Old Gentleman With The Amber Snuff-Box

The old gentleman, tapping his amber snuff-box
(A heart-shaped snuff-box with a golden clasp)
Stared at the dying fire. "I'd like them all
To understand, when I am gone," he muttered.
"But how to do it delicately! I can't
Apologize. I'll hint at it ... in verse;
And, to be sure that Rosalind reads it through,
I'll make it an appendix to my will!"
--Still cynical, you see. He couldn't help it.
He had seen much, felt much. He snapped the snuff box,
Shook his white periwig, trimmed a long quill pen,
And then began to write, most carefully,
These couplets, in the old heroic style:--

O, had I known in boyhood, only known
The few sad truths that time has made my own,
I had not lost the best that youth can give,
Nay, life itself, in learning how to live....

Alfred Noyes

The Old Meeting House

(New Jersey, 1918)


Its quiet graves were made for peace till Gabriel blows his horn.
    Those wise old elms could hear no cry
    Of all that distant agony--
Only the red-winged blackbird, and the rustle of thick ripe corn.

The blue jay, perched upon that bronze, with bright unweeting eyes,
    Could never read the names that signed
    The noblest charter of mankind;
But all of them were names we knew beneath our English skies.

And on the low gray headstones, with their crumbling weather-stains,
    --Though cardinal birds, like drops of blood,
    Flickered across the haunted wood,--
The names you'd see were names that woke like flowers in English lanes.

John Applegate was fast asleep; and Temperance Olden, too.
    And David Wort...

Alfred Noyes

The Open Door

O Mystery of life,
That, after all our strife,
    Defeats, mistakes,
Just as, at last, we see
The road to victory,
    The tired heart breaks.

Just as the long years give
Knowledge of how to live,
    Life's end draws near;
As if, that gift being ours,
God needed our new powers
    In worlds elsewhere.

There, if the soul whose wings
Were won in suffering, springs
    To life anew,
Justice would have some room
For hope beyond the tomb,
    And mercy, too.

And since, without this dream
No light, no faintest gleam
    Answers our "why";
But earth and all its race
Must pass and leave no trace
    On that blind sky;

Shall reason close that door
On all we struggled for,
    Seal the soul's do...

Alfred Noyes

The People's Fleet

Out of her darkened fishing-ports they go,
    A fleet of little ships, whose every name--
Daffodil, Sea-lark, Rose and Surf and Snow,
    Burns in this blackness like an altar-flame;

Out of her past they sail, three thousand strong,
    The people's fleet that never knew its worth,
And every name is a broken phrase of song
    To some remembered loveliness on earth.

There's Barbara Cowie, Comely Bank and May,
    Christened, at home, in worlds of dawn and dew:
There's Ruth and Kindly Light and Robin Gray
    With Mizpah. (May that simple prayer come true!)

Out of old England's inmost heart they sail,
    A fleet of memories that can never fail.

Alfred Noyes

The Phantom Fleet

(1904)


The sunset lingered in the pale green West:
    In rosy wastes the low soft evening star
Woke; while the last white sea-mew sought for rest;
    And tawny sails came stealing o'er the bar.

But, in the hillside cottage, through the panes
    The light streamed like a thin far trumpet-call,
And quickened, as with quivering battle-stains,
    The printed ships that decked the parlour wall.

From oaken frames old admirals looked down:
    They saw the lonely slumberer at their feet:
They saw the paper, headed Talk from Town;
    Our rusting trident, and our phantom fleet:

And from a neighbouring tavern surged a song
    Of England laughing in the face of war,
With eyes unconquerably proud and strong,
    And lips triumpha...

Alfred Noyes

The Realms Of Gold

(Written after hearing a line of Keats repeated by a passing stranger under the palms of Southern California.)


Under the palms of San Diego
    Where gold-skinned Mexicans loll at ease,
And the red half-moons of their black-pipped melons
    Drop from their hands in the sunset seas,
And an incense, out of the old brown missions,
    Blows through the orange trees;

I wished that a poet who died in Europe
    Had found his way to this rose-red West;
That Keats had walked by the wide Pacific
    And cradled his head on its healing breast,
And made new songs of the sun-burned sea-folk,
    New poems, perhaps his best.

I thought of him, under the ripe pomegranates
    At the desert's edge, where the grape-vines grow,
In a sun-kissed ranch between...

Alfred Noyes

The Reward Of Song

Why do we make our music?
    Oh, blind dark strings reply:
Because we dwell in a strange land
    And remember a lost sky.
We ask no leaf of the laurel,
    We know what fame is worth;
But our songs break out of our winter
    As the flowers break out on the earth.

And we dream of the unknown comrade,
    In the days when we lie dead,
Who shall open our book in the sunlight,
    And read, as ourselves have read,
On a lonely hill, by a firwood,
    With whispering seas below,
And murmur a song we made him
    Ages and ages ago.

If making his may-time sweeter
    With dews of our own dead may,
One pulse of our own dead heart-strings
    Awake in his heart that day,
We would pray for no richer guerdon,
    No praise fr...

Alfred Noyes

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