Alfred Noyes

Noyes' ambitious epic verse trilogy The Torch-Bearers – comprising Watchers of the Sky (1922), The Book of Earth (1925) and The Last Voyage (1930) – deals with the history of science. In the "Prefatory Note" to Watchers of the Sky, Noyes expresses his purpose in writing the trilogy:

In 2002, a forensic examination of the Black Diaries concluded that they were authentic.

Noyes' last poem, Ballade of the Breaking Shell, was written in May 1958, one month before his death. He died at the age of 77, and is buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery at Totland, Isle of Wight.

In 1957, Noyes published his last book, The Accusing Ghost, or Justice for Casement (US title: The Accusing Ghost of Roger Casement). In 1916, the renowned human rights campaigner Roger Casement was hanged for his involvement in the Irish Nationalist revolt in Dublin known as the Easter Rising. To forestall calls for clemency, the British authorities showed public figures and known sympathizers selected pages from some of Casement's diaries – known as the Black Diaries – that exposed him as a promiscuous homosexual. In an era of institutionalised homophobia, this underhand tactic worked and the expected protests and petitions for Casement's reprieve did not materialise.

Noyes' last book of poetry, A Letter to Lucian and Other Poems, came out in 1956, two years before his death by polio.

In 1955, Noyes published the satirical fantasy novel The Devil Takes A Holiday, in which the Devil, in the guise of Mr Lucius Balliol, an international financier, comes to Santa Barbara, California, for a pleasant little holiday. He finds however, that his work is being so efficiently performed by humankind that he has become redundant. The unwonted soul-searching this leads him to is not only painful but also – owing to a tragicomic twist at the end – ultimately futile.

He was a writer and actor, known for The Highwayman, The Lady and the Bandit (1951) and The Highwayman (1951).

In 1949, Noyes returned to his home on the Isle of Wight. As a result of increasing blindness, he dictated all his subsequent works. In 1952 he brought out another book for children, Daddy Fell into the Pond and Other Poems. The title poem has remained a firm favourite with children ever since. In 2005, it was one of the few poems that featured in both of two major anthologies of poetry for children published that year, one edited by Caroline Kennedy, the other by Elise Paschen.

Noyes remained in retirement in California for some years. In 1943, he published The Secret of Pooduck Island, a children's story set off the coast of Maine. It features a family of squirrels threatened by natural enemies (skunks, weasels) and humans, the ghost of a Native American man who suffered a terrible sorrow in the colonial era, and a teenage boy who has ambitions to be an artist and who is able to help both the squirrels and the ghost. It is, however, far more profound and terrible than the lighthearted accounts of animal behaviour seem on the surface to indicate; a mysterious voice keeps whispering words of mystery to the artist Solo, and most of the characters turn out to be incarnations of the various follies and stupidities of mankind: the fierce lonely boy-artist (who is nearly locked up as insane by the petty spiteful villagers) and the pudgy but wise priest, as well as the solemn ghost of Squando, being the only exceptions against which the others are contrasted. The entire "secret" of Pooduck Island consists in the gleams of the supernatural that blaze through the canopy of the material world, like a glimpse of the ocean through an arch in the woods that Solo names the "Eye" of the island. The mysterious Voice, who is hinted to be Glooskap himself, appears indirectly as an invisible model for a portrait of the Squirrel family, who think they are seated on a stump: but the picture records him.

During World War II, Noyes wrote the same kind of patriotic poems, but he also wrote a much longer and more considered work, If Judgement Comes, in which Hitler stands accused before the tribunal of history. It was first published separately (1941) and then in the collection, Shadows on the Down and Other Poems (1945). The only fiction Noyes published in World War II was The Last Man (1940), a science fiction novel whose message could hardly be more anti-war. In the first chapter, a global conflict wipes out almost the entire human race.

In 1940 Noyes published a science fiction novel, The Last Man (US title: No Other Man), in which the human race is almost wiped out by a powerful death ray capable of killing everyone, friend or foe, unless they are in a steel chamber deep under the surface of the sea. The inventor's chief assistant unscrupulously sells the plans to the leading nations of the world, who declare they will use the ray only as a "last resort". When events spiral out of control, however, they all activate it, killing everyone living on the earth.

Worse was to come. After Casement's death, the British authorities held the diaries in conditions of extraordinary secrecy, arousing strong suspicions among Casement's supporters that they were forged. In 1936, there appeared a book by an American doctor, William J. Maloney, called The Forged Casement Diaries. After reading it, W. B. Yeats wrote a protest poem, "Roger Casement", which was published with great prominence in The Irish Press. In the fifth stanza of the poem, Yeats named Alfred Noyes and called on him to desert the side of the forger and perjurer. Noyes immediately responded with a letter to The Irish Press in which he explained why he had assumed the diaries were authentic, confessed he might have been misled, and called for the setting up of a committee to examine the original documents and settle the matter. In response to what he called Noyes' "noble" letter, Yeats amended his poem, removing Noyes' name.

In 1929, Noyes published the first of his three novels, The Return of the Scare-Crow (US title: The Sun Cure). A light-hearted story combining adventure, satire and comedy, it is about an earnest young clergyman named Basil. During a walk on the South Downs, Basil comes across a ruined cottage, where he decides to try sunbathing naked, as recommended by a friend. His clothes vanish, and he has to battle his way back to them through a series of mental hazards – all the latest intellectual fads and follies – and ends up rather less naïve than before.

In 1927, the year after his first wife's death, Noyes married Mary Angela née Mayne (1889–1976), widow of Lieutenant Richard Shireburn Weld-Blundell, a member of the old recusant Catholic Weld-Blundell family, who had been killed in World War I. Later that year, Noyes himself converted to Catholicism. He gives an account of his conversion in his autobiography, Two Worlds for Memory (1953), but sets forth the more intellectual steps by which he was led from agnosticism to the Catholic faith in The Unknown God (1934), a widely read work of Christian apologetics which has been described as "the spiritual biography of a generation". In 1929, Noyes and Mary Angela settled at Lisle Combe, on the Undercliff near Ventnor, Isle of Wight. They had three children: Hugh (1929–2000), Veronica and Margaret. Noyes' younger daughter married Michael Nolan (later Lord Nolan) in 1953.

For the Pageant of Empire at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, Noyes wrote a series of poems set to music by Sir Edward Elgar and known as Pageant of Empire. Among these poems was Shakespeare's Kingdom.

Noyes' best-known anti-war poem, "The Victory Ball" (aka "A Victory Dance"), was first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1920. He wrote it after attending a ball held in London soon after the Armistice, where he found himself wondering what the ghosts of the soldiers who had died in the war would say if they could observe the thoughtless frivolity of the dancers. The message of the poem lies in the line, "Under the dancing feet are the graves." A brief passage about a girl "fresh from school" who "begs for a dose of the best cocaine" was replaced by something innocuous in the Post version, but reinstated when the poem appeared in a collection of Noyes' verse. "The Victory Ball" was turned into a symphonic poem by Ernest Schelling and into a ballet by Benjamin Zemach. In 1966, at the height of the Vietnam War, Congressman H. R. Gross, indignant at a White House dinner dance that went on until 3 a.m. while American soldiers were giving their lives, inserted Noyes' poem in the Congressional Record as bearing "directly on the subject matter in hand".

In 1918, Noyes' short story collection, Walking Shadows: Sea Tales and Others, came out. It included both "The Lusitania Waits" and "The Log of the Evening Star". In 1924 Noyes published another collection, The Hidden Player, which included a novella, Beyond the Desert: A Tale of Death Valley, already published separately in America in 1920.

Noyes adds that the theme of the trilogy had long been in his mind, but the first volume, dealing with Watchers of the Sky, began to take definite shape only on the night of 1/2 November 1917, when the 100-inch reflecting telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory was first tested by starlight. George Ellery Hale, the man who conceived and founded the observatory, had invited Noyes, who was then in California, to be his guest on this momentous occasion, and the prologue, subtitled "The Observatory", gives Noyes' detailed description of that "unforgettable...night". In his review of Watchers of the Sky, the scholar and historian of science Frederick E. Brasch writes that Noyes' "journey up to the mountain's top, the observatory, the monastery, telescopes and mirrors, clockwork, switchboard, the lighted city below, planets and stars, atoms and electrons all are woven into...beautiful narrative poetry. It seems almost incredible that technical terms and concepts could lend themselves for that purpose."

During World War I, Noyes was debarred by defective eyesight from serving at the front. Instead, from 1916, he did his military service on attachment to the Foreign Office, where he worked with John Buchan on propaganda. He also did his patriotic chore as a literary figure, writing morale-boosting short stories and exhortatory odes and lyrics recalling England's military past and asserting the morality of her cause. These works are now forgotten, apart from two ghost stories, "The Lusitania Waits" and "The Log of the Evening Star", which are still occasionally reprinted in collections of tales of the uncanny. "The Lusitania Waits" is a ghost revenge story based on the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915 – although the tale hinges on an erroneous claim that the submarine crew had been awarded the Goetz medal for sinking the ship.

Noyes is often portrayed by hostile critics as a militarist and jingoist. Actually, he was a pacifist who hated war and lectured against it, but felt that, when threatened by an aggressive and unreasoning enemy, a nation could not but fight. On this principle, he opposed the Boer War, but supported the Allies in both the World Wars. In 1913, when it seemed that war might yet be avoided, he published a long anti-war poem called The Wine Press. One American reviewer wrote that Noyes was "inspired by a fervent hatred of war and all that war means", and had used "all the resources of his varied art" to depict its "ultimate horror". The poet and critic Helen Bullis found Noyes' "anti-militarist" poem "remarkable", "passionate and inspiring", but, in its "unsparing realism", lacking in "the large vision, which sees the ultimate truth rather than the immediate details". In her view, Noyes failed to address the "vital questions" raised, for example, by William James' observation that for modern man, "War is the strong life; it is life in extremis", or by Shakespeare's invocation in The Two Noble Kinsmen of war as the "great corrector" that heals and cures "sick" times. Bullis, a Freudian (unlike Noyes, for whom psychoanalysis was a pseudo-science), thought war had deeper roots than Noyes acknowledged. She saw looming "the great figures of the Fates back of the conflict, while Mr Noyes sees only the 'five men in black tail-coats' whose cold statecraft is responsible for it". In 1915, Upton Sinclair included some striking passages from The Wine Press in his anthology of the literature of social protest, The Cry for Justice.

Noyes' only full-length play, Sherwood, was published in 1911; it was reissued in 1926, with alterations, as Robin Hood. One of his most popular poems, "A Song of Sherwood", also dates from 1911. Eventually, one of the more popular ballads dating from this period, "Bacchus and the Pirates", was set to music for two voices and piano by Michael Brough, and first performed at the Swaledale Festival in 2012.

In 1907, Noyes married Garnett Daniels, youngest daughter of US Army Colonel Byron G. Daniels, a Civil War veteran who was for some years U.S. Consul at Hull. Noyes first visited America in February 1913, partly to lecture on world peace and disarmament and partly to satisfy his wife's desire that he should gather fresh experiences in her homeland. His first lecture tour lasted six weeks, extending as far west as Chicago. It proved so successful that he decided to make a second trip to the US in October and to stay six months. In this trip, he visited the principal American universities, including Princeton, where the impression he made on the faculty and undergraduates was so favourable that in February 1914 he was asked to join the staff as a visiting professor, lecturing on modern English literature from February to June. He accepted, and for the next nine years he and his wife divided their year between England and the US. At Princeton, Noyes' students included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. He resigned his professorship in 1923, but continued to travel and lecture throughout the United States for the rest of his life. His wife died in 1926 at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, where she and Noyes were staying with friends.

Another major work in this phase of his career was Drake, a 200-page epic in blank verse about the Elizabethan naval commander Sir Francis Drake, which was published in two volumes (1906 and 1908). The poem shows the clear influence of Romantic poets such as Tennyson and Wordsworth, both in style and subject.

Noyes published five more volumes of poetry from 1903 to 1913, among them The Flower of Old Japan (1903) and Poems (1904). Poems included "The Barrel-Organ". "The Highwayman" was first published in the August 1906 issue of Blackwood's Magazine, and included the following year in Forty Singing Seamen and Other Poems. In a nationwide poll conducted by the BBC in 1995 to find Britain's favourite poem, "The Highwayman" was voted the nation's 15th favourite poem.

In 1898, he left Aberystwyth for Exeter College, Oxford, where he distinguished himself at rowing, but failed to get his degree because he was meeting his publisher to arrange publication of his first volume of poems, The Loom of Years (1902) on a crucial day of his finals in 1903.

Alfred Noyes was born on September 16, 1880 in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England.