Dark Encounter! Trivia Quiz

Answer: A highwayman

Alfred Noyes was an English poet, short-story writer and playwright, best known for his ballads "The Highwayman" and "The Barrel-Organ". "The Highwayman"mm tells the story of an unnamed highwayman who is in love with Bess, a landlord's daughter. Betrayed to the authorities by Tim, a jealous ostler, the highwayman escapes ambush when Bess sacrifices her life to warn him. Learning of her death, he dies in a futile attempt at revenge, shot down on the highway.

In the final stanza, the ghosts of the lovers meet again on winter nights.

The poem makes effective use of vivid imagery for the background and of repetitious phrases to create the sense of a horseman riding at ease through the rural darkness to a lovers' tryst or of soldiers marching down the same road to ambush him.

Answer: W.H. Auden

"Night Mail" was written in 1936 to accompany the documentary film of the same year and the same title. The film concerned a London, Midland, and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train travelling from London to Scotland. Auden's poem was read toward the end of the film, set to music by Benjamin Britten.

The rhythm of the film matches the train's movement, and a reader can almost hear the train chugging along as it brings the letters to the people of England and Scotland.

Answer: Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (13 November 1850 - 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer.

"A Child's Garden of Verses" (1885), written for children but also popular with their parents, includes such favourites as "My Shadow" and "The Lamplighter".

Answer: "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes

Noyes was born in Wolverhampton, England, the son of Alfred and Amelia Adams Noyes. When he was four, the family moved to Aberystwyth, Wales, where his father taught Latin and Greek. The Welsh coast and mountains were an early inspiration to Noyes. In 1898, he left Aberystwyth for Exeter College, Oxford, where he distinguished himself at rowing, but failed to get his degree because, on a crucial day of his finals in 1902, he was meeting his publisher to arrange publication of his first volume of poems, The Loom of Years (1902).

From 1903 to 1913, Noyes published five additional volumes of poetry, among them "The Flower of Old Japan" (1903) and "Poems" (1904), which included one of his most popular poems, "The Barrel-Organ". His most famous poem, "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.

Answer: A hymn

"Lead, Kindly Light" is a hymn with words written in 1833 by John Henry Newman. Becalmed at sea on his return from Italy, the vicar, John Henry Newman, composed the hymn, "Lead, Kindly Light". Back in England, he preached at his college, calling men to repentance.

His messages attracted large numbers. The church in Ireland had suffered some heavy-handed blows from the English government. Anglicans felt threatened. The government took the stance that it had absolute authority over the church. Newman's concern led him to issue a series of Tracts for the Times. Through these he hoped to define more clearly the Church of England's doctrine and position so that the church would not be subject to the whims of the government.

Answer: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by S.T. Coleridge

Coleridge was one of the Romantic poets based around Wordsworth and the Lake District poetic community, brought into being in the last quarter of the 18th century in answer to the Enlightenment. Wordsworth and Coleridge published "Lyrical Ballads" in 1780 as a kind of manifesto, and this poem was Coleridge's prime contribution.

He was, as is well known, a serious opium addict, which may explain the poem's surrealism.

Answer: To the Dark Tower

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" is a poem by English author Robert Browning, written in 1855 and first published that same year in the collection titled "Men and Women".

The poem opens with Roland's speculations about the truthfulness of the man who gives him directions to the Dark Tower. The gloomy, cynical Roland seeks the tower and undergoes various hardships on the way, although most of the obstacles arise from his own imagination. The poem ends abruptly when he reaches the tower, so what he finds there is never revealed. In this case it is more important to travel than to arrive.

Answer: Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life.

"We grow accustomed to the Dark -
When light is put away -
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye -

A Moment - We uncertain step
For newness of the night -
Then - fit our Vision to the Dark -
And meet the Road - erect -

And so of larger - Darknesses -
Those Evenings of the Brain -
When not a Moon disclose a sign -
Or Star - come out - within -

The Bravest - grope a little -
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead -
But as they learn to see -

Either the Darkness alters -
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight -
And Life steps almost straight."

Answer: A.E. Housman

Usually known as A. E. Housman, Alfred Edward Housman was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems "A Shropshire Lad". Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems were mostly written before 1900. Their wistful evocation of doomed youth in the English countryside, in spare language and distinctive imagery, appealed strongly to late Victorian and Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th century English composers, both before and after the First World War. Through its song-setting the poetry became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself.

"West and away the wheels of darkness roll,
Day's beamy banner up the east is borne,
Spectres and fears, the nightmare and her foal,
Drown in the golden deluge of the morn."

Answer: Walter de la Mare

Walter de la Mare was born on April the 25th, 1873 in Charlton, Kent, England. He died on June 22nd, 1956, in Twickenham, Middlesex, England and is buried at St. Paul's Cathedral, London, England. He attended St. Paul's Cathedral Choir School, London, before working for the Anglo-American (Standard) Oil Company in London as a clerk in the department of statistics between the years 1890 and 1908. Subsequently, de la Mare was able to concentrate on writing full-time thanks to the offer of a government pension

"While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head: -
'Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,' he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone."