Let’s Talk! – Watch for Me by Moonlight

What a tricky prompt Tyrean Martinson’s book gave us for today’s conversation topic … My first train of thought was “person, moonlight, danger”, and I ended up with werewolf! Now, I could make up a story of me turning into a werewolf, of course. Is the female form “werewolverine”, by the way?

Knowing my friend, though, she probably had something different in mind, and so I googled “watch for me by moonlight”. I came up – probably no surprise to you – with Alfred Noyes poem “The Highwayman”. I had never read it and was intrigued by this ballad. To those of you who, like I, don’t know the story: An innkeeper’s daughter arranges to meet with a highwayman. A jealous ostler betrays this to the authorities, at which soldiers fetter the girl and bind a gun to her, the muzzle pointing at her chest. She shoots herself in order to warn the highwayman who flees. After he hears of her sacrifice, he returns for revenge but gets shot. It’s now their ghosts who date.

What a ballad! Romantic to the point of getting gothic, yet brutal in its realism. What struck me most, as yet, was the author siding with a highwayman rather than with the authorities. And the lady in distress kills herself in order to save her knight. Interesting twists, to say the least.

As I said before, I never knew this ballad. But I grew up with poetry. The earliest poem I knew by heart was German author Theodor Storm’s Christmas monologue “Knecht Ruprecht” (pronounce k-nah-t ‘roop-rah-t, i.e. farmhand Rupert); I was four. By that time, I knew texts of folksongs and church hymns galore, as well. We were singing a lot at home, and I caught the texts by ear. Call that oral tradition at its best … My mother also recited poetry to us – I loved it and knew we had books that consisted entirely of that genre.

In my second year of school, our class had to learn by heart a poem by Dutch author Lea Smulders about a woman who is sad when the sun shines, but happy when it is raining; the punchline is that she earns her living by selling umbrellas. Each of us had to recite the poem in front of the class. Imagine hearing the same poem approximately 30 times – self-inflicted torture to our classroom teacher. I still know this poem by heart, by the way.

We had to recite poetry until tenth grade. By that time, we were free to choose the poems we wanted to learn by heart. How many times did I listen to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s ballad about a Catholic who finds shelter under a Huguenot’s roof whose wife he once tortured to death, to Heinrich Heine’s Feast of Belshazzar or Friedrich Schiller’s Cranes of Ibykus, The Hostage, and The Diver?! Some of us mixed it up a bit and chose less narrative poetry by Goethe, Hesse, Rilke, or Lenau.

Reciting poetry in front of an audience was a thing not just in German schools. Think of Anne of Green Gable’s poetry recital at the White Sands Hotel – in the book it is Carolina Oliphant’s “The Maiden’s Vow”, a short, dramatic poem that is “all Anne”. Funny that the 1985 movie script chose “The Highway Man” instead, a poem that was only published in 1907, thereby creating an anachronism, as Anne by that time would have been a rather mature woman in her 30s, not a girl of sixteen. As we can see, the choice of a poem doesn’t just tell you about the person who recites it – I doubt Anne would have chosen a poem about a villain and a rather dubious love story when she could have chosen dramatic but wholesome. A poem can even mark a specific period in time.

Which makes me think that I should read one of my poetry books sometime again. Do I have a favorite poem or poet? Don’t get me started – it’s your turn now to ponder on the prompt …