How Does Alfred Noyes Use Metaphors In The Highwayman

Beauty, despair, crime, and death all describe Alfred Noyes poem The Highwayman. Alfred Noyes uses Metaphors, similes, and repetition to emphasize his points and details on the highway man. The poem is not only a beautiful piece of literature but a wonderful example on how you can use gorgeous objects to describe a not so gorgeous person and events. “The wind was a torrent of darkness upon the gusty trees,” this is the very first line of the first stanza in Alfred Noyes the Highwayman. This line is also the very first literary device Noyes uses in the poem, a metaphor. The next two lines, “The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,” and “The road was a ribbon of moonlight looping the purple moor,” are also metaphors. By Noyes using metaphors in the first three lines of the first stanza he really paints a picture on the mood and setting of this poem. What I understand from the first three lines is that it is a dark eerie night with violent wind and just cloudy enough that the clouds cover the bright full moon, with a long winding road lit by nothing in the blackness of night. …show more content…
In the thirteenth stanza line two Noyes says “Her face was like a light!” this is a very evident simile in the poem. Alfred Noyes is using this simile to describe the fear in Bess’s face. He does so by making it seem like her face was lighting up, which is normally associated with beauty, but her face is not lighting up with beauty it is lighting up because the color has washed out of her face she is so scared. He used this example of a simile just like he used the metaphors in the first stanza. He is using Beauty to hide the bad, maybe to change the view on the highwayman. He may use this technique to make the highwayman look like a better person instead of the criminal he really