What Is The Mood Of The Poem Highwayman

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The orientation of the poem occurs between stanzas one and three and these introduction stanzas are used to describe the highwayman, his situation with Bess and the setting of the poem. The first stanza is an informing introductory paragraph for the poem because of its spooky, mysterious tone. In the first stanza, there are frequent metaphors used to describe the setting, for example; ‘The road was a ribbon of moonlight, looping the purple moor’ (line 3). The whole of the first three stanzas are used to introduce the poem and give a detailed description of the location, which helps to foreshadow a moody tone further in the novel. Alfred Noyes continuously repeats ‘The ___ was a ___’ in lines 1,2 and 3 to clearly express the meter intended.

The initial complication occurs in stanza four, when the poet is describing the features of Tim the Ostler and using dramatic irony to entice the reader by giving them more information than the characters in the narrative are capable of. The author used dramatic irony to mould the reader’s interest in the matter and shape their opinion as a
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Punctuation is used to slow down the reader and create tension before the problematic events in all lines of the stanza. Although, the last line is complementary to the broken tension after the secret is finally revealed and absolutely no punctuation is used. In stanza 13, Bess made the decision to ‘shatter her breast in the moonlight and warn him with her death’ and again the reader is drawn into the story by the author’s use of literary techniques and also their emotional response to the incident. The rhyming pattern remains identical to all the other stanzas of the poem, techniques like onomatopoeia are visible like in the word shatter. Furthermore, the constant repetition of the word Moonlight continues throughout stanza

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