A Clear Explanation of ‘The Horses’ by Ted Hughes
This is one of Hughes’ most famous and accomplished poems. The speaker is walking in a field at the crack of dawn - he looks up to a ridge, and sees horses silhouetted against the sky. Hughes seems to have a deep understanding of animal instincts. The speaker raises alarm at the offset with the phrases 'evil air' and a 'frost-making stillness'. Having sensed danger, the speaker reassures the readers with the words 'brightening grey.' In the poem ‘The Horses’, Hughes has created a life-force and distinctly non-human expression. He observes man's reluctance to acknowledge the sources of energy; the horses have endured severe conditions all night long, yet they accept the new day graciously.
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“I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,”
What a startling way to open a poem! Here, Hughes’ speaker is in a forest, at the hour before dawn, and it feels as though he’s waiting for the sun to come up. The atmosphere is ‘Evil’, it feels dangerous and wrong to him, and the ‘frost’ suggests that it is a cold or difficult experience. The later imagery of ‘a world cast in frost’ suggests that he is in the depths of winter - the entire landscape is stark and frozen around him.
He looks up towards a hill, and he sees the shape of horses against the sky. At this point, they are just
“Grey silent fragments
Of a grey silent world.”
Then, everything changes: the sun erupts as dawn breaks, streaming orange and red light into the landscape. Everything is bathed in sunlight, and the world seems to open up at this point - the horses, who looked before like they were made of stone, suddenly start to move. It’s a powerful experience for the speaker, whom we assume is the poet himself. He wishes that later on in life, when he’s in a busy city surrounded by people, that his memory will take him back to this moment - where these tough frozen horses and this cold winter landscape endured the cold, to the point where it was bathed in light.
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