Noyes has published several volumes of lyrical verse. Some of it possesses the lightness of these elfish tales. The Barrel Organ, The Song of Re-Birth, and Forty Singing Seamen are among his finest lyrics. They display much rhythmic beauty and variety. He strikes a deeply sorrowful and passionate note in The Haunted Palace and De Profundis. A line like this in The Haunted Palace—
"…I saw the tears
Bleed through her eyes with the slow pain of years,"[11]
indicates the strong emotional metaphor that occasionally deepens the passion of his verse.
England's sea power, immortalized in song from Beowulf to Swinburne, often inspires Noyes. His finest long poem is Drake: An English Epic (1908), which relates the adventures of this Elizabethan sea-captain and his victory over the Armada. The spirit of a daring romantic age of discovery is shown in these lines that tell how Drake and his men—
"…went out
To danger as to a sweetheart far away,
Who even now was drawing the western clouds
Like a cymar of silk and snow-white furs
Close to her, till her body's beauty seemed
Clad in a mist of kisses."[12]
Another volume of poems, Tales of the Mermaid Tavern (1913), brings us into the company of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spencer, Jonson, Raleigh, and others of the great Elizabethan group that made the Mermaid Tavern their chosen resort. Greene's farewell to Shakespeare,—
"You took my clay and made it live,"[13]
shows that Noyes has caught something of the spirit that animated Elizabethan England.
Noyes is one of the most spontaneous and fluent writers of modern English poetry. Whether he is mystical, dramatic, playful, or marching along the course of a long narrative poem, he handles his verse with ease and facility. His language, his rhythm, and his thought are most happily blended in his graceful singing lyrics. The work of Noyes is inspired by the desire to show that all things and all souls are—
"One with the dream that triumphs beyond the light of the spheres,
We come from the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of
Years."[14]