One Kiss, My Bonnie Sweetheart

highwayman

When my wife and I leave the house in the morning, I will sometimes call out to her, “One kiss, my bonnie sweetheart” and we will embrace before going our separate ways.   I suspect you recognize the line, which is from one of the English language’s most beloved poems, Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman.” I write about it as an example of how poetry, even when it enters our lives in small ways, adds a rich texture to existence.

 The poem was written in 1906 by a young Alfred Noyes and became an instant classic.  Of course, highwaymen were a thing of the past when it appeared.  That’s why they could be romanticized, just as Indians became romantic figures when they had been driven to reservations and pirates became romantic when they no longer sailed the high seas.  (Pirates have dropped a notch in the romantic department since the emergence of Somali pirates.) In real life, highwaymen were a sorry lot.

 Although that being said, Macheath (or Mac the Knife), created in 1728 by John Gay in Beggar’s Opera, was swashbuckling at a time when highwaymen still plied their trade.  Then again, maybe they cut a romantic swath because they contrasted with the bourgeois mercantilism that was beginning to define England.  Macheath puts his life in danger on the moor while Peachum, his fence, keeps account books as he decides who to encourage and who to betray.

 In any event, when I quote the line from the poem and kiss Julia, we are thrown momentarily into a fantasy where I am a dashing figure with French cocked-hat and rapier, the romantic lover who will return to her “though hell should bar the way.”  And she sits red-lipped and black-eyed in the shadows, plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.   In that fleeting second it matters not that Julia does not have sweet black waves that I can kiss in the moonlight, nor that I have ridden a horse only once in my life and that badly.

And who are the forces around us that threaten our happiness?  Who are the jealous ostler and the murderous soldiers?  They are life itself, bled dry of imagination as we go off to attend to our duties and pay our bills and mow the lawn.  Of course they are jealous of our perfect union.  The soldiers tie up Bess while it is still daylight and shoot the highwayman down at noon.  They do their work in the blood-red day, not when the world turns mysterious with moonlight.  They are regimentation and efficiency. Coarse, unromantic, and disrespectful of beauty, they destroy what they touch.

But they do not prevail.  No matter how pervasive and overpowering they seem, I have but to invoke the magic words—“one kiss, my bonny sweetheart”—and . . .

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.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

3 Comments

  1. WordPress › Error

    There has been a critical error on this website.

    Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.