 |
| Alfred Noyes achieved fame and success as a poet as a very young man. |
What can you make of a major 20th Century Poet so old fashioned that some of his most ardent admirers think of him as a contemporary of Wordsworth and all those old Romantics? Who was reviled
in is life by some as an unpatriotic
pacifist and by others as militarist
and jingoist—sometimes in the very same years? Who moved
from skeptical free thought to ardent Catholic apologist? Who as a science
fiction novelist invented the idea of a doomsday weapon and inspired
George Orwell? Who penned beloved children’s novels and
whose last book was an apology for not having come to the defense of an Irish patriot hung by his
country decades earlier?
All of that describes Alfred Noyes, who died on June 25, 1958
on the Isle of Wright.
Noyes was born on November 16, 1880
in Wolverhampton in the English West Midlands. His father operated a grocery and tutored Latin and
Greek. When the boy was four years old the family
moved to Aberystwyt, Wales where his father taught school. Growing up on the wild, beautiful Welsh coast, the boy absorbed romantic folk tales, and the locals’ love of language.
Enrolling at Exner College, Oxford in 1898, Noyes excelled at
rowing and spent much of his time writing starry-eyed poetry. Although a fine student he failed
to earn his degree because he skipped his final examinations in 1902
to meet with the publisher of his first collection of verse, The Loom of Years.
Noyes quickly established
himself as both a popular poet and a critically respected one. He issued five more collections before
he turned 33 years old in 1913. These
included some of the poems for which he is best remembered today like The Barrel Organ from the 1904
volume Poems with its refrain:
Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;
Go down to Kew in
lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland
Go down to Kew in
lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)
|
||
Two years later his great ballad The Highwayman was published in Blackwood’s Magazine and
included in his collection Forty
Singing Seamen and Other Poems. The rhythmic
ballad with its evocative images
and story of doomed sacrificial love
quickly made it an enduring favorite. In 1995 it was voted Britain’s 15th favorite poem of all time in a BBC poll.
It remains a favorite recital
piece and has been set to music
several times, most notably by Phil Ochs
in 1965:
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.
As a young poet Noyes was unabashedly looking backward and drawing inspiration from English history and lore. A major
project of these early years was a 200
page epic poem Drake about the Elizabethan
explorer, pirate, and naval
commander Sir Francis Drake. The blank verse opus was issued in two
volumes in 1906 and ’08.
It was possible in those early years of the 20th Century for a popular
poet to make a good living in
Britain. And so Noyes did. He never
needed to take up a profession or trade. He was a literary
man. As such he was able to woo Garnett Daniels, youngest
daughter of the U.S. Consul at Hull, Colonel Byron G. Daniels who was an Army veteran of the Civil
War veteran who was stationed there for some years. The couple wed in 1907 while the second volume of Drake was in preparation. It
was by all accounts a blissfully happy
union.
Noyes continued to mine English lore
for inspiration. In 1911 he published a
full length play in verse Sherwood. Although not overtly political and far from socialist
the play invited comparisons
between the oppressive capitalists and their protectors in government in his day and
rapacious Prince John and his minions. His fascination
with Robin Hood was also displayed
in one of his most popular poems published the same year A Song of Sherwood:
Softly over Sherwood the south wind blows.
All the heart of England his in every rose
Hears across the greenwood the sunny whisper leap,
Sherwood in the red dawn, is Robin Hood asleep?
Hark, the voice of England wakes him as of old
And, shattering the silence with a cry of brighter gold
Bugles in the greenwood echo from the steep,
Sherwood in the red dawn, is Robin Hood asleep?
As tensions in Europe rose
and war seemed to be closing in,
Noyes turned his attention to the threat.
He considered himself a pacifist. In 1913 he published a long anti-war poem called The Wine Press that got wide spread admiration and attention on both sides of the Atlantic. He began lecturing
on peace. His American wife
convinced him that he should take her
home for a visit and take advantage of invitations
to speak on the subject in the U.S.
The couple spent six weeks in the
States making it as far west a Chicago
in February and March. The tour was so
successful and Noyes so enjoyed the
adulation and attention that they returned in October for a second tour. On that round an appearance at Princeton so impressed school authorities that he was invited to join the faculty.
Beginning in 1914 Noyes lectured
in poetry in the spring semester
every year until 1923, returning to England for the balance of the year. He was a popular
teacher and his students included
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and John Peale Bishop.
 |
| Alfred Noyes at Princeton, 1915 |
Noyes kept up this commitment even through World War I when U-boats sometimes
made the crossings dangerous. The war also challenged Noyes’s pacifism.
He had never been an absolute
no-war-ever type. He had opposed the Boer War because it was offensive
and to him manifestly unjust. But, he asserted, that when threatened by an aggressive and unreasoning
enemy, a nation could not but fight. Thus he fell
in line with many other pre-war anti-militarists, anti-imperialists, pacifists, and socialists who abandoned their opposition to war to line up enthusiastically behind their
country’s arms.
Kept
from enlisting due to his poor eye sight, Noyes did war
duty with the Foreign Office in
a propaganda assignment. He also churned
out morale-boosting stories and poems for the home press. This material,
though popular, was well below his usual
standards as if his heart was not
all the way in it. Few of these
pieces are now remembered except for two ghost
stories that occupy a niche
among horror story fans—The
Lusitania Waits and The Log of the Evening Star.
 |
| A bitter reflection on the aftermath of the carnage of the Great War, The Victory Ball was first published in the American Saturday Evening Post in 1920 under the title A Victory Dance. |
After the war, with much of his generation brutally wiped out,
Noyes quickly returned to his pacifism as if a veil had been raised from his eyes.
The Victory Ball inspired by his revulsion at an official gala he attended in which he imagined the ghosts of the dead and the
brokenhearted young women left behind
mingling with the high and mighty and
mighty who had sent them to their
doom, appeared in the American Saturday Evening Post in 1920. It was later set to music as a symphonic
poem by Ernest Schelling and made a ballet by Benjamin Zemach.
The symbols crash,
And the dancers walk,
With long silk stockings
And arms of chalk,
Butterfly skirts,
And white breasts bare,
And shadows of dead men
Watching them there.
Shadows of dead mean
Stand by the wall,
Watching the fun
Of the Victory Ball’
Other writers and poets were stirred by the horror of the war and by
winds of change in culture and literature. The post-war years saw the spectacular rise of the imagists and modernists. Whatever moral and ethical concerns he might
have shared with the likes of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, they were moving
stylistically in directions he did
not wish to follow. He continued to
produce the highest quality, but quite old fashion verse. More over his inner prude was deeply
offended by the excesses of some, especially James Joyce, who he despised. He traded
critical barbs with the new literary
types, dimming somewhat his
reputation among later scholars.
Although otherwise productive, the
1920’s brought heartbreak, a religious awakening, and finally a new relationship. Noyes’s beloved wife Garnett died in 1926 at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, while the couple was visiting a friend. Heartbroken Noyes, a firm pre-war skeptic, turned to religion for solace, particularly to the mysteries of Roman Catholicism.
This process was undoubtedly influenced by Mary Angela Mayne, the war
widow of Lieutenant Richard
Shireburn Weld-Blundell, a member of the old recusant Catholic family. The two were married in 1927 and he officially converted a year later. He described his intellectual conversion process in The Unknown God,
published in 1934 and one of the most
widely read and admired Catholic apologetics
of its time.
Noyes and his wife settled in the near idyllic Lisle Combe, a
19th Century country house on the Undercliff near Ventnor, Isle of Wight.
In 1939 Britain and Europe were once
again plunged into war and Noyes had
to face his old dilemma again. Faced with what looked like an even more
evident evil in the world, he again threw
his support to the allied war effort.
But this time in addition to rah-rah stuff for the press, there was much more nuance in his writing.
 |
| The Last Man had the first use of a doomsday machine. |
In 1940, as bombs fell on London, Noyes published his science fiction novel The Last Man, published in the U.S.
as The
Only Man. After a super weapon—a death ray—falls into the hands of all of the powers, each one pledging to use it only as a “last
resort”—each of them in turn deploys it virtually wiping out life on Earth.
An accidental survivor,
who was trapped on a sunken submarine
at the time of the attack, escapes to find
himself alone. He journeys across Europe to find others
like him before arriving in Italy where
he discovers a beautiful young girl
and her scientist employer who had
survived in a diving bell while photographing the sea bed. It turns out that the professor was the inventor of the ray which he leaked to the governments knowing what
would happen. His plan was to survive with his assistant and repopulate the world with her as Eve to his new Adam. The hero and girl
discover the horrible truth.
The book was one of the first dystopian novels
and the Death Ray was the very first use of a doomsday weapon that became a staple of science fiction after the Atomic and Hydrogen bombs made the concept all too real. The book was widely praised. George
Orwell wrote one major review
and later cited the book as one of the inspirations
for Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In still neutral America the book was also popular and a new round of
speaking invitations brought Noyes and his wife across he dangerous Atlantic in
1940. He lectured widely and advocated for Britain with a nuanced damnation of war itself. A series of lectures he gave in 1941 at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick, Canada called The Edge of the Abyss was published
the next year pondered the future of the
world, attacking totalitarianism,
bureaucracy, the pervasive power of the state, and the collapse of moral
standards.
 |
| Richard Lindne's illustration for The Edge of the Abyss published in 1942 based on American lecture on the future in light of the grim present of World War II. |
Noyes remained in America through the war and afterwards settling in California. Besides his
popular press, pro-allies pieces, he also wrote If Judgment Comes, a long
poem in which Hitler stands accused before the tribunal of
history. He also wrote the first of two children’s books, the whimsical The Secret of Pooduck Island, set off the coast of Maine
featuring a family of squirrels
threatened by their natural enemies,
skunks, weasels, and humans, and
the ghost of a Native American man who suffered
a terrible sorrow.
Noyes remained in the United States
until failing health and eyesight
drove him home to the Isle of Wright in 1949.
Now virtually blind he dictated his remaining works which
included another book for children, Daddy Fell into the Pond and Other Poems
in 1952. He returned to science fiction
and fantasy with The Devil Takes A Holiday in which the title character vacations in Santa Barbara only to discover that humans on their own were supplying
enough evil to render him superfluous.
His last book of poetry, A Letter to Lucian and Other Poems,
came out in 1956.
Now suffering not only from
blindness, but crippled with polio,
Noyes’s last book was an effort to correct
an old personal wrong. When the internationally recognized human rights crusader and Irish Patriot Sir Roger Casement was scheduled to be hung for this involvement with the 1916 Easter Uprising, Noyes was a leader of a raft of respected English
intellectuals who planned to launch a public campaign on his behalf. British authorities showed public figures and
known sympathizers purported selected
pages from some of Casement’s diaries
that portrayed him as a promiscuous homosexual. The
dirty trick release of what came to be known as the Black Diaries revolted the prudish poet and, as
expected neither he nor almost any other public figure dared to expose themselves to danger by defending a “pervert.”
 |
| The grave of Alfred Noyes and his widow. |
Noyes died on June 25, 1958 of
complications from polio at his Isle of Wright home and was buried in Catholic cemetery at Freshwater.
