About Love and Loss - Review of The Highwayman

    The poem, set in 18th-century rural England, 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 sacrificesher life to warn him, Learning of her death, he is killed in a futile attempt at revenge. In the final stanza, the ghosts of the lovers meet again on winter nights. With the tragic love story between the highwayman and Bess, it leads us to think about love and loss. What love meant to be and what the meaning of loss is in a piece of love.

    From a worldly perspective, love without loss is blissful, showing ordinary peoples’s hoping of a happy ending. Values about love can be different at different times, but the pursuit of a happy love is constant among them and keeps making appearances in literacy works. In the poem, Bess fell in love with a highwayman but it’s hard to decide whether she fell in love with a wrong man because their love itself is a story of redemption and purity. But it’s sure that Tim’s love to Bess that led him to betray Bess is far worse than the highwayman and Bess’s martyrdom ended love. The love triangle displayed two extremities of love, touching and disgusting, and we are still praising the touching ones. As times went by, the ideas of love never changed and stayed what they were.

    Loss is accompanied with love. Love is part of the responsibility which adults have an obligation to undertake despite the risk of loss, and that decides that love always comes with loss. In the poem, the highwayman fell in love with Bess, and they both died for life. They took on the responsibility of love, and death is their heaviest price. Similar things take place in the world meanwhile. After marriage, both of the couple have to give way to their own dreams, concession to dreams out of unavoidability is their loss in their love. It seems that such loss is meant to happen as part of destiny. Love rewards people with happiness and a sense of belonging, love rewards people with painful loss as well.

    Loss makes love comprehensive. Nothing on Earth can take place without twists and setbacks. In literary theory, there is a term called "tragic aesthetics", and flawed love is more or less like this. In the poem, when the highwayman realized the loss of his lover, rather than driven by a passionate heart, it was the inspiration of a sense of responsibility in his heart that led him to join the death of his lover, successfully brought their love story from simply a romance story to a story of redemption and growth. When their love came to an extreme but reasonable end as the highwayman refused to survive at the cost of losing love, the contract between the two kinds of love made theirs even more touching. Their love ended with the end of their lives, and that was the most lamentable loss in their love of growth. Love without loss might be pleasing to us, but it decides that it can’t be a piece of deep praise far and wide, it's hard to touch people's hearts, either. With loss, romance can be bestowed with themes far more than love, but responsibility and growth.

    It’s common for us to feel lamentable for tragic love stories, but a flawless love story never gets readers to have a sense of empathy as imperfection keeps unfolding around us. At all times and all over the world, literary figures always seem to prefer imperfect love, while we ordinary people can only experience all kinds of regrets in human life. Venus de Milo has stood still for thousands of years, proving loss can be perfect. In the poem The Highwayman and the play Leon and Jo, It is precisely such regret that makes them pass down and sing by futurity. Loss is accompanied with love, making it imperfect and lamentable, while making it comprehensive and heart-moving.