English poem Horses Description

2. THE HORSES
BY TED HUGHES

3. About the Poet (Ted Hughes)
 Born in 1930.
 Famous English poet, translator, and
writer.
 Married to Sylvia Plath.
 Died in 1998.
 Famous poems include The Horses, The
Hawk in the Rain (1957), Crow (1970),
The Birthday Letters (1998), etc.

4. ‘THE HORSES’ at a glance!
 Ted Hughes was the poet who was fascinated with nature and animals. He wrote
his poems about the appearance and the way the animals behave. The poem
speaks about horses whom the poet sees in the dawn. He differentiates between
the appearance of the horses in the daylight and the dawn. The normal posture of
the horses look strange and scary in the dark. The horses were laying as a still
objects which even do not look like the living beings. As the sun shines in the
sky, the horses become lively again. In this way, the image of the horses have
been stored in the memory of the poet.

5. I climbed through woods in the hour-before-
dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,
 This creates a setting of an early before
sunrise, when the atmosphere is chilly,
dark and gloomy.
 The ‘air’ is being personified suggesting
that the atmosphere is cruel and unsafe.

6. Not a leaf, not a bird—
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood
 The word ‘frost’ means the state of
coldness and emphasizes the
hardness and stillness that it shows
no sign of living at all. Not even a leaf
or birds are to be found.
 The line shows that he climbed
through the woods and now this line
is telling that he is now above the
wood. He is now looking at the scene
from above so he can see it more
clearly.

7. Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron
light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness
 This line is a metaphor showing that it
was so cold that even his breath froze into
a twisty, bendy statue.
 The process of the darkness is being
slowly removed.

8. Till the mooring—blackening dregs of the
brightening grey—
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:
 It shows the process of the sun
becoming brighter and brighter killing
off the evil darkness. It shows the
contrast between the skies.
 This line shows he saw the horses
and the he paused to look at them.
The horses were like a huge standing
out show piece.

9. Huge in the dense grey—ten together—
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,
 The metaphor of ‘Megalith-still’ is
showing that’s the horses were so still that
they were like large stones.
 The sign of them breathing could only tell
that they were a living thing.

10. with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.
 He was so much surprised to see the
horses in that state.
 Their breathing could only tell that they
were a living thing.

11. I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments; Of a grey silent world.
 This line illustrates the horses as being in
sync with its surroundings. They were
like little pieces of what makes up the
world so they tend to synchronize with it.
 The repetition of ‘grey’ shows the
darkness and the gloominess of the mood.

12. I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the
silence.
 There is little to be seen on the moor-
ridge (a moor is open country, also it
is still quite dark) and the only sound
he can hear is the sob of the curlew.
 Curlews sob only intermittently, and
most often only from far away.
 Hughes suggests that this faint,
melancholy, and distant sound
actually makes the silence of the early
morning seem more silent.

13. Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then
the sun
Orange, red, red erupted
 Once the sun is up light comes
suddenly, but even so there is time to
notice the sun's dominant shade turn
from orange (as the disk first
emerges) to red (when the disk is at
half-show).
 The usage of red in this line is to
emphasize the sun becoming more
visible and its starting to become
clearer.

14. Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung
cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,
And the big planets hanging—I turned
 This line relates to how volcano would
erupt. The sun seems to tear through the
middle of the black night sky, almost as if
it were un-wrapping the blue sky with
clouds underneath.

15. Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down
towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,
 This line is similar to the first paragraph
because of the usage of dark and woods.

16. And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of
light,
 This line shows that he is surprised
that the horses still haven’t moved at
all. The horses are however very
visible now because of the light.
 He realizes just how magical and
mythical these creatures are. The light
has made them strange in the way
that a drug-hallucination of a religious
vision is strange.

17. Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them
The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,
 These lines show how everything is
starting to move but the emphasis of the
no still shows that after a very long while,
the horses are still not moving.

18. Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays—
 The word ‘patient’ makes it seem like the
horses are waiting for something.
 The horses appear calm, sure of their
place in the world.

19. In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place
Between the streams and red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.
 The poem ends with the narrator hoping,
in a sentence construction reminiscent of
prayer, that he will always remember the
horses. Significantly, he now identifies
them as “my memory.”
 They have become something both
personal and abstract, and they seem to
embody a spiritual resilience of which the
narrator did not seem capable in the first
lines of the poem.