The Poetry of Horses

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What does riding horses give us? An escape from the world. Exercise in fresh air. Adrenaline rushes. Healing through the bond.” – Unknown The Horses’ by Ted Hughes paints the scene in the first few lines of the poem. Here, the poet appears as climbing through the woods to reach the hilltop. While describing the ambiance around him the poet uses some interesting metaphors. Likewise, in the first two lines “hour-before-dawn dark” refers to particular darkness that is only visible just one hour before dawn. The light is there in the heart of darkness but still, it’s not dawn. That’s the beauty of nature that presents a unique beauty in every second. Whereas, in the second line, “Evil air” contains a personification as well as a metaphor. Here, the skin-biting sensation of cold is referred to with these words. The poet feels that the invisible air was biting his skin like evil. Additionally, “frost-making stillness” refers to the stillness of the air. In the next few lines, the tranced mind of the poet cajoled his legs in a manner that he stumbled. It seems like something deep inside his heart couldn’t let him go. At last, the poet descended from the bosom of the “kindling tops” and came to the horses for a closer view.

Trapezoid mastered stillness: a midnight mare, she was sternest and tallest, her chest stretched against the edges of her stall. Hinton, Laura, and Cynthia Hogue, editors, We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics, University of Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa, AL), 2002. To understand the soul of a horse is the closest human beings can come to knowing perfection.” – Unknown Coltelli, Laura, editor, The Spiral of Memory: Interviews: Joy Harjo, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1996. Yet he remains modest about their style: “I would hate to insult the great poets and prefer to describe what I write as rhymes. There’s nothing that clever about them, but I think they reflect what racing fans feel about this sport and the memories they have of some of the great horses and races that we’ve been privileged to witness.”

101 Of The Best Horse Quotes

Horses and Men in the Rain by Carl Sandburg – In this poem, Carl Sandburg talks about horses and their resemblance to men. In several instances, the internal rhythm of the poem breaks. But, it breaks for the best. It reflects the sifting of pictures in the poet’s mind as if he is dreaming of the scene. This kind of writing is also called the stream-of-consciousness technique. Apart from that, the use of soft sounds like the “s”-sound makes the poem’s tone a pleasant one. The sound scheme utilized in the poem makes one feel the freshness of dawn just like the poet felt on that day. We kept him until he died… and sat with him during the long last minutes when a horse comes closest to seeming human.” – ​ C.J. Mullen

A stubborn horse walks behind you, an impatient horse walks in front of you, but a noble companion walks beside you.” – Unknown Library Journal, October 15, 1994, p. 72; November 15, 1994, p. 70; June 1, 1997, p. 100; June 15, 2002, p. 70. Editor with Gloria Bird) Reinventing the Enemy's Language: North American Native Women's Writing, Norton (New York, NY), 1997. When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.” – William Shakespeare PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—A Research and Reference Guide, http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/harjo.html/ (March 10, 2004).Bruchac, Joseph, editor, Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, University of Arizona Press (Tucson, AZ), 1987. A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.” – ​ Samuel Johnson One of those horses achieved a unique claim to a piece of racing history: “Popham Down won the Scottish Grand National for us in 1964 and it is through this horse that my family can lay claim to as close an association possible to one of the most famous, or infamous moments in Racing History, the Grand National pile-up of 1967, which was solely brought about by Popham Down.

Balassi, William, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Eysturoy, editors, This Is about Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 1990. Perhaps this rumination doesn’t offer any good insight to those who have explored the reoccurring themes in their own work, and in the works of others, but I have found that for the past 10 years, if a poem has a horse in it, well, I pay attention. (Let me also say that my mother is a painter who often paints horses and is a caretaker of a 40-acre horse ranch, so the landscape of equestrian power is indelibly woven into my creative identity.) Moreover, the poet uses metonymy in “iron light”. It depicts the color of light at dawn. The poet also uses onomatopoeia in the poem by referring to the snorting of horses and the curlew’s call. Moreover, the poet uses several metaphors throughout the poem. As an example, “grey silent fragments” refers to the horses metaphorically. There is also a metaphor in the use of the word “erupt” for referring to the sun’s appearance in the sky. It was also the cover of Horses that established Smith’s memorable style. “I think it was the way it presented women,” says Williams. “It was a new way of looking, a new way of seeing that people didn’t know how to express until then. It opened a door for people who were looking for a door, though they didn’t know what it looked like they knew they would recognise it when they saw it.”Like ‘The Horses’ by Ted Hughes the following poems also present a similar kind of theme and talk about the beauty of the horses. Before I loved horses, I had nothing to live for. Now I love horses and can’t stop seeing things to live for.” – Unknown A lesser-known poem than some on this list, ‘Why Some Girls Love Horses’speaks on themes of childhood and coming of age. The poem also delves into relationships between children and animals. It expresses a speaker’s admiration for a horse that was “smarter than most of the children” the child when to school with. The speaker ages as the poem progress and they learn to love the horse for its own freedom and how it is a slave to no one.