However, if you take a closer look, the differences become just as significant as the similarities. Tennyson’s Lady is trapped within her own artistic creation, meeting her demise the moment she dares to confront life directly. In contrast, Noyes’s Bess exists fully in the real world, killed when jealousy, soldiers, and empire invade her space. One poem explores the peril of desire breaking through self-imposed isolation, while the other depicts desire being hunted by external forces. Both women die for love, but the dangers they face come from entirely different sources.
These two galloping romantic tragedies are often the first that readers encounter, and the distance between them highlights much of what narrative poetry can achieve.
The Reader's Atlas · Compare
The Lady of ShalottThe Highwayman
Put "The Lady of Shalott" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1832) next to "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes (1906), and you’ll notice the similarities right away: both are long narrative poems with lively rhythms, both tell the story of a woman who meets her end because of a man she loves, and both have found a lasting place in…
Poets
Alfred, Lord Tennyson / Alfred Noyes
Years
1832 / 1906
§01 The thesis
The Lady of Shalott & The Highwayman
A reader's case for putting these two side by side — what each carries, and what they argue when they sit on the same page.
§02 The dialectic axes
The two poems on four axes
Each axis isolates one specific vector — speaker, form, image, closing move — and reads the two poems against each other on that single dimension.
Axis
Poem A
The Lady of Shalott
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Poem B
The Highwayman
Alfred Noyes
01Speaker
Poem A · The Lady of Shalott
Tennyson employs a detached third-person narrator who observes the Lady from a distance, almost in a clinical manner. We only hear her voice in two short outbursts — "I am half sick of shadows" and "The curse is come upon me" — which makes her inner thoughts feel locked away, just as unreachable to us as she is to the people of Camelot.
Poem B · The Highwayman
Noyes employs a third-person narrator who is both breathless and biased, fully supporting the lovers. In "The Highwayman," the narrator aims to immerse you in the romance and the outrage — there's no detached analysis here, just pure momentum and passion.
02Form
Poem A · The Lady of Shalott
"The Lady of Shalott" is structured in four sections, with each stanza consisting of nine lines that follow a close interlocking rhyme scheme (AAAABCCCB). The title appears again as a closing refrain. This ornate and recursive form mirrors the way the Lady moves in her tower, creating a sense of circularity.
Poem B · The Highwayman
"The Highwayman" features long, six-line ballad stanzas that create a rhythmic anapestic gallop, encouraging readers to speed up as they go. The lines are longer and more relaxed, designed to propel the reader forward rather than confine them.
03Image
Poem A · The Lady of Shalott
The main image in Tennyson's poem is the cracked mirror — the Lady can only perceive the world through its reflection, and when she finally looks directly, "the mirror crack'd from side to side." This symbolizes the idea of mediation and highlights the price of prioritizing art over life.
Poem B · The Highwayman
The main image in Noyes's poem is the road illuminated by moonlight — inviting, perilous, and compelling. While Tennyson presents us with glass and confinement, Noyes offers wind and vastness. The road is the link between the lovers and ultimately leads to their demise.
04Closing move
Poem A · The Lady of Shalott
Tennyson concludes with Lancelot's curt, seemingly casual remark about the Lady's lifeless body: "She has a lovely face." This closing hits hard — the man for whom she sacrificed everything dismisses her to a mere aesthetic in a single phrase, and then the poem comes to a close.
Poem B · The Highwayman
Noyes won't let death be the conclusion. The last stanzas affirm that the highwayman and Bess continue to ride together under the moonlight, their love transformed into a ghostly legend. This is a comfort that Tennyson deliberately denies.
§03 Synthesis & departure
The shared ground and the divergence
Shared
Both poems tell stories through a rhythmic, almost hypnotic repetition. In Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott," the refrain strikes hard at the end of nearly every stanza, while Noyes repeats "the highwayman came riding" like a steady drumbeat. This repetition isn't just for effect; it builds a sense of fate closing in, of something inevitable. Each poem also features a powerful visual image that embodies the entire romantic ideal: Lancelot's shining armor and the highwayman's velvet coat and pistol grips. The women in these poems are almost solely defined by their love for these men, and both meet their ends before their lovers fully grasp the consequences. There's a shared theatrical quality too—these works are meant to be read aloud and reward a performance. In the end, life continues around them, indifferent or momentarily disturbed, while the women's deaths fade into the landscape and become part of the legend.
Where they diverge
The most significant difference lies in the source of the fatal threat. In Tennyson's poem, the Lady's demise stems from within — a curse she only partially grasps, set in motion by her own act of looking. It’s not an external attack; she reaches out to the world, and that very reaching leads to her death. Lancelot is unaware of her existence until she has already become a corpse. In contrast, Noyes's poem presents an entirely external threat: a jealous soldier, the redcoats, and the machinery of state violence. Bess dies as a conscious act of warning and sacrifice — she possesses full awareness and agency in her final moments.
This distinction shapes their forms. Tennyson employs a slow, incantatory nine-line stanza with a complex rhyme scheme that keeps the reader enclosed within the tower alongside the Lady. Noyes, on the other hand, uses a looser, faster ballad meter that mimics a galloping horse — it is a poem that moves through space rather than circling in place. One poem confines; the other propels forward.
§04 A reader's order of operations
Which to read first
If you landed here via "The Lady of Shalott," give "The Highwayman" a read next for that same engine roaring without any brakes. Noyes cuts through the Pre-Raphaelite embellishments, delivering just the raw plot and heartbeat. If you came from "The Highwayman" and are curious about why its emotional contours feel so recognizable, Tennyson's poem offers a deeper, stranger take — it's slower, more suffocating, and ultimately more unsettling because the woman's tragedy is profoundly personal and largely overlooked.
§05 Reader's questions
On The Lady of Shalott vs The Highwayman, frequently asked
Answer
Yes, often — particularly in middle and high school curricula. They are paired because both are engaging narrative poems with strong rhythms, romantic plots, and tragic endings, making them great starting points for teaching ballad form and poetic narrative.
Answer
Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" was published in 1832, which makes it 74 years older than Noyes's "The Highwayman," published in 1906. Noyes grew up reading Tennyson, and you can definitely see his influence in Noyes's ballad style.
Answer
From Tennyson, we often recall: "The mirror crack'd from side to side; / 'The curse is come upon me,' cried / The Lady of Shalott." In Noyes's poem, the lines that stick with us are the vivid opening description of the highwayman riding — "The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas" — capturing the entire atmosphere of the poem in just one image.
Answer
Bess chooses to sacrifice herself intentionally as a warning to her lover. In contrast, the Lady of Shalott acts on impulse and gets caught up in a curse she never fully grasped. So, in that regard, Bess's death represents a conscious decision, while the Lady's feels more like an unavoidable fate she falls into.
Answer
No. Tennyson intentionally keeps the origin and specific details unclear — the Lady herself "knows not what the curse may be." This ambiguity enhances the poem's strength; the curse acts more as a symbol of enforced isolation rather than a straightforward plot device.
Answer
"The Lady of Shalott" is steeped in the supernatural — featuring a curse, a magical web, and set against an Arthurian backdrop. On the other hand, "The Highwayman" remains grounded in realism for most of its narrative. However, Noyes introduces a ghostly conclusion where the lovers ride together after death, bringing a touch of the supernatural right at the end.
Answer
"The Lady of Shalott" holds a more significant place in the literary canon and has inspired much more critical scholarship, in part due to Tennyson's status as a major Victorian poet and because the poem's themes of art, isolation, and the male gaze resonate with larger discussions in literary criticism. In contrast, "The Highwayman" is cherished as a popular poem and has enjoyed a longer presence in song adaptations and popular culture.