HORSE
By Anne SextonHorse, you flame thrower,
you shark-mouthed man,
you laughter at the end of poems,
you brown furry locomotive
whipping the snow, I am
a pale shadow beside you.
Your nostrils open like field glasses
and can smell all my fear. I am
a silver spoon. You are a four-footed
wing. If I am thirsty you feed me
through an eyedropper, for you are a
gallon drum. Beside you I feel
like a little girl with a papa
who is screaming.And yet and yet,
field horse lapping the grass
like stars and then your droppings,
sweet melons, all brown and
good for gardens and carrots.
Your soft nose would nuzzle me
and my fear would go out singing
into its own body.
This is from the “bestiary poems” of Anne Sexton’s posthumous collection, 45 Mercy Street. Each poem’s title is an ordinary, real animal—June Bug, Whale, Gull, Seal, Earthworm, Raccoon, Cockroach…. Clearly, she is playing with the Medieval Bestiary, treatises on real and often imaginary creatures:
The aim of the stories and illuminations was not to impart factual information or visual accuracy but rather to convey the wonder, variety, or hidden meaning found in the natural world. Originally, the bestiary was intended for religious education within the church, but it was eventually sought after by wealthy members of society for devotional reading as well as entertainment. (From a description of the J. Paul Getty Museums exhibition on the “The Bestiary in the Medieval World”).
As is often the case with Sexton, she works to adapt and reconfigure a known human construct into a deeply personal, sometimes impenetrable even, contemplation.
The poem begins with three striking, unexpected metaphors for the horse: “flame thrower,” “shark-mouthed man,” “laughter at the end of poems,” followed by a fourth, more obvious metaphor, “brown furry locomotive whipping the snow.” Each of these three opening metaphors emerges from a place only Sexton could conjure, the first especially. “You flame thrower” may well speak to the raw energy of the horse, a tremendous, potentially violent, scorching power. As the first line of the poem, it throws the reader into knowing immediately that language/thinking will be used differently here, despite the seemingly simple intent of the poem—to say something about horses.
The first few lines of the poem force us to jump headlong into the metaphoric/analogical/emotional dynamics at play when the poet encounters the horse. “Flame thrower”: something dangerous and powerful, something with a far, hot reach, something burning and alive as it moves through the air…. “Shark-mouthed man” feels less purely emotive, grounded somehow in those remarkable, large horse teeth—large and daunting as those of a shark, yet square and resembling those of a man. Literally, however, it also invites us to see a man with a shark’s mouth—another threatening image, as male figures so often are in her poems (and something we will soon see even more clearly in this poem). And immediately after these two jarring metaphors, comes “you laughter at the end of poems,” possibly a side-handed reference to a horse’s whinny, but also something that feels more personal, especially given that she is a poet. The horse somehow speaks to the feeling one gets at the end of a poem that elicits emotion, laughter—joy, fulfillment—the horse itself somehow the incarnation of that emotion.
There’s a bit of relief when the horse is compared to a “brown furry locomotive / whipping the snow.” Here’s something more ordinary, more graspable, but since it comes after those first three more startling and unexpected metaphors, the tone feels more playful, complex, as if to say, “here’s what everyone sees, a stock literary device to describe it, but this only after the first three more elusive and dynamic impressions.”
And now that we have swung back toward the more ordinary, we find a few more literal lines as the poet/speaker of the poem is introduced directly into the scene: “I am / a pale shadow beside you. / Your nostrils open like field glasses / and can smell my fear.” I recently attended my first ever polo match with my daughter when she was visiting for Thanksgiving, and walking into the arena where the match was being played, a tremendous pony stood out of his paddock, held there by leads, and as I always am around horses (ever since taking my daughter to riding lessons as a young girl), I felt uncomfortable, and the horse tilted his head toward, me, casting a wary eye my way, flaring those big nostrils as my daughter calmly stroked his nose…. All to say that Sexton here works to acknowledge that extreme size differential at play, how small and “pale” and like “shadow” we feel in comparison. The simile, “Your nostrils open like field glasses” is so apt, zooming in and capturing the way a horse moves the flaps of its enormous nostrils as it works to assess you.
But immediately after these more grounded, relatable lines, we find “I am / a silver spoon. You are a four-footed / wing.” And just as we think “I am / a silver spoon” is only a momentary shift away from more standard language and imagery with the literal words “four-footed,” this adjective then lands on something else utterly unexpected, “wing.” “I am a silver spoon” is one of those Sexton lines that seems nearly impenetrable. How does the imagery and emotion and tone of the poem bring her from being a “pale shadow” afraid of the “flame-thrower…shark-mouthed man” of a horse to being a “silver spoon” alongside it? Perhaps this speaks to her role as poet, as the creator of this bestiary, attempting to serve the horse up, her poems about these “beasts” small, delicate, elegant, alongside the beast itself, and like a silver spoon possibly utterly insufficient? “Four-footed wing” seems a kind of contradiction, an answer to the poet as a “silver spoon,” asking “how can you ever capture/ingest/serve me if I am so many disparate and elusive things all at once?” “Wing” also speaks, as did “flame thrower” to the possibility of the horse to move fast, to “fly” away at great speed and with great ease. Horses are “four-footed” but these don’t limit them as they do other “beasts” in this bestiary.
The poem then turns in a new direction. We get an if, then clause as explanation and preamble to the next startling metaphor, “If I am thirsty you feed me / through an eyedropper, for you are a / gallon drum.” Despite this additional set up and justification of the metaphor “you are / a gallon drum,” the imagery is no less confounding and elusive than the earlier imagery. We are asked to envision several sets of large/small images here: “eyedropper” vs “thirsty” and “gallon drum.” The horse is working to quench her thirst, but only one small drop at a time, her thirst surely never being fully quenched in this way—even as the horse itself is a “gallon drum” of potentially thirst-quenching substance. Given that this is a section of a “bestiary,” these lines could well speak to her desire to have her understanding of the horse—in symbolic or religious or spiritual terms—“quenched.” Like that silver spoon which she is, here too, despite its fear-inducing power, the poet can only take in one droplet of the horse’s immensity at a time. The final lines of the first stanza, “Beside you I feel / like a little girl with a papa / who is screaming,” again take a turn toward the more ordinary, and for me they also turn toward the more personal, as if Sexton is admitting that whatever emotion the horse elicits in her could well be grounded in/informed by her personal backstory—an angry father, large, looming, terrifying, yet somehow still the fond, familiar, “papa.”
Through the repetition and large indent of the first line of the second stanza, “And yet and yet”—and notice there is no comma after the first “And yet”—comes a muted excitement and wonder as she turns away from the more disturbing image of the angry father. This final stanza builds toward a celebratory, exultant tone, that even praises horse droppings, acknowledging their potential as fertilizer.
The horse, is now a “field horse lapping the grass / like stars,” this second simile less grounded, more purely emotive—how can grass be “like stars”? Or, is the lapping action itself the thing that is “like stars”? Stars are small and distant, glittering far out of our reach, while this horse is right here. From this elusive simile that takes us into outer space, she instantly turns to the horse droppings with the transition “and then,” “And then your droppings, ” as if she is purposefully tracing both the highest, most abstract things at play alongside the most mundane—horse manure that is “good for gardens and carrots.”
The poem ends with that “laughter at the end of poems”: “Your soft nose would nuzzle me / and my fear would go out singing / into its own body.” The tone here is clearly positive, thankful, hinging on epiphany. This tender moment of contact, this intimate interaction, transforms other emotions of the poem to such a degree that her “fear goes out singing,” just as the poem itself goes out singing. And in keeping with the back and forth momentum of the poem from the grounded to the elusive, the poem appropriately ends on a powerfully elusive “into its own body,” as if “fear” is something that exists on its own, an incarnation, a “beast” of its own. And I can’t forget the more chilling fear at the center of the poem, the little girl beside the “papa who is screaming.” For me, the poem also “says” something about this moment of contact with a wondrous “beast” as a kind of healing moment, erasing that tangible fear of things larger and foreboding that may well have first been awakened in childhood.
The ending of the poem reminds me of a favorite James Wright poem, “A Blessing,” which ends with a similar moment of deep, emotional exhilaration and revelation coming from contact with a horse. “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom,” (a poem I will take a close look at in a coming post). I can’t help but wonder if Sexton here is alluding directly to Wright’s poem (published in 1963, while the “Bestiary” poems weren’t published until after her suicide in 1976, though it’s unclear when it was originally written). Part of me, however, would prefer to think that both of them came to a similar feeling of something leaving their bodies after using their poetic voices to observe then come into dirct contact with a horse.
This poem also reminds me, as Sexton, especially, always does, of the way great poets work to forge utterly new ways of using language, reigniting words with elusive, yet powerfully expressive meaning.
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