the horses by the English poet Ted Hughes appeared in his first collection of 40 poems the hawk in the rain in 1957. in the poem The Speaker describes a walk in the greatness of the early morning Twilight through a wintry wood up the side of a hill to the Moorland Beyond everything is cold silent and still on the way he encounters a group of 10 motionless horses who appear asleep remaining undisturbed by his presence even as he walks past them he pauses on the Moore Ridge and Witnesses the sunrise which is in contrast to what he has just experienced an explosion of movement and color profoundly moved by how it gives him a momentary awareness of his own position in the vast Cosmos he abruptly turns and descends back towards the wood he encounters the horses once again even though they are now bathed in the early morning sunshine which warms them they remain as they were before motionless and patient a picture of serenity symbolic of the immutability and beauty of nature he concludes the poem with his heartfelt wish that in the metaphorical streets of his future life which will be noisy and crowded with memories of other events and people he will be able to meet or freely recall this memory of isolation and enduring calm to bring him peace of mind as with his other poems in this collection there are echoes of works by other poets this poem is strikingly reminiscent of an extract from the Romantic poet William wordsworth's most famous epic poem the prelude in the extract Wordsworth describes an episode from his youth in the Lake District when he steals a boat on a summer's night and Rose out onto old's water towards the summit of a ridge on the other side of the lake as his position on the lake changes so does his perspective and sense of scale and a terrifyingly huge Peak which has been hidden from him up until now suddenly bursts into view the site filled in with ore and Dread as he realizes the vast Scale of the Universe and he turns the boat around to return to shore as quickly as he can these sites have a lasting impression on both Wordsworth and Hughes but while for Wordsworth it is a terrifying one that haunts his waking thoughts and fills his dreams for Hughes it is a memory that he actively wishes to be able to call to mind in the future presumably because of the steadying and grounding effect of the horses being as it is a calming antidote to the noisy crowdedness of memories of other events and people jostling to be recalled the poem is made up of 18 stanzas 16 of which comprise two lines while two comprise three is written in free verse in that it has no fixed metrical or rhythmic structure Egypt Etc and no set rhyme scheme EGA b a b Etc line lengths vary between as few as two syllables and as many as 16. Hughes also makes extensive use of Enchantment and suzura and patterning of stressed syllables in places to both modulate the Rhythm and reinforce his meaning extensive sound patterning such as alliteration EG tear turned consonant CG cast in Frost and assonance CG breath left give the poem a sense of cohesion and musicality repetition of various kinds features heavily such as anaphora Iji not a leaf not a bird parallel syntax EG making no move making no sound and poliptatum EG dark and darkness and served to emphasize the all-pervading sense of emptiness the color gray features four times and in combination with other words I.E Frost iron blackening and Stone form a semantic field of monochromicity in the first half of the poem this contrasts with the semantic field of color in stanzas 9 and 10. I.E orange red twice and blue Hughes also forms another semantic field of immovability and permanence ice Stillness cast statues megalith still making no move draped still stood hung and endure to evoke not only the calmness of the moment but also the immutability of nature because the poem is describing a memory it is written in the first person and largely in the past tense the final two stanzas are governed by the subjunctive mood I.E may I still meet which is used to express desires and hypothetical scenarios in this case it is the hope that he will be able to recall this memory years later Hue structuring of the poem in two line and three-line stanzas of widely varying line lengths enhances the idea of a memory that comes to him in a succession of stream of Consciousness images rather than in a continuous narrative the structure also makes it impossible to read quickly and so enhances the atmosphere of calmness that pervades the poem there are three compound adjectives that Hughes has coined himself EG are Before Dawn Frost making and megalith still which helped to evoke the Striking amount of unique detail which he is able to recall the title the horses pinpoints their significance in the speaker's memory as their Serenity remains constant whether during the frost making Stillness of the Twilight or the flow of light of the sunrise the poem begins I climbed through Woods in the hour before Dawn dark the verb climbed here suggests the speaker is moving uphill and the compound adjective hour before Dawn to describe the dark evokes the special quality of light that you get in the short period of Twilight in the morning just Before Sunrise as well as in the evening just after sunset due to the low levels of light The receptors in our eyes that are sensitive to color are not activated and so we see everything in Shades of Gray the predominance of stressed syllables in this phrase hour before Dawn dark and the alliteration of the heavy plosived Sounds here creates a monotone feel which will go on to enhance the monochrome quality of the light Hughes continues by personifying the evil air the hardness of these initial vowel sounds evoking its life-restricting power possessing as it does a frost making Stillness around him there is not a leaf not a bird the anaphora here with the repeated Nutter emphasizing The Emptiness and lack of nature in this winter landscape the world appears cast in Frost metaphorically as well as literally Frozen as static as something fashioned out of a hard substance such as metal the harsh consonants of the sibilance The plosive Sounds enhancing the sense of inertia he continues I came out above the wood he has climbed beyond the tree line and is now in open more land even the Misty clouds of his breath as it condenses in the cold morning air appear in the original sense of the word petrified or turned to stone my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light note fuses intricate sound patterning here with the asinet E and the semi-continence of the fricative and evoking the sound of his breathing while the consonants of the plosive T sounds in the metaphor left torturous statues in the iron light which makes the line hard to enunciate helps to evoke impossibly elaborate figures carved from White marble even beyond the darkness of the wood the light has the quality of iron it is hard gray and cold Hughes now describes how the light touches the heights of the Moorland first giving the retreating Knight a fluid quality almost as though it has a physical substance and is therefore subject to the laws of gravity as it is pulled downwards but the valleys were draining the darkness till the more line blackening drags of the brightening gray halved the sky ahead the heaviness of the plosive Sounds in the alliterative draining the darkness enhancing this idea the word dregs is used to describe the residue of a liquid often containing sediment like coffee grounds left in the bottom of a finished cup and adds to this idea of the darkness as a liquid that is slowly seeping away but is leaving a stain on the more line the border between the Earth and the sky note the internal syllabic rhyme as well as the plosive alliteration of blackening and brightening which also adds to the heavy tone the way this moorline halved the sky ahead seems to be a reference to the Horizon and the way in which the brightening gray of the sky stands out against darker land the way Hughes starts a new sentence beginning with the coordinating conjunction and to introduce the horses makes them stand out and is an indication of their significance and I saw the horses their presence is imposing as he describes them as being huge in the dense gray tend together megalith still a megalith is a large stone that forms a prehistoric monument either by itself or as part of a larger group such as at Stonehenge and so not only gives an indication of their size solidity and immovability but also gives a sense of their eternal spirit and permanence enhanced by the cesura here the horses are clearly asleep as they breathed making no move with draped manes and tilted hind Hooves making no sound the adjective drape to describe their main suggests An Elegant heaviness which appears as though carved from Stone and the way their hind hooves are tilted rather than flat on the ground thus giving them the appearance of having been frozen in time also lends the horses a Monumental quality he continues I passed not one snorted or jerked its head they remain unmoved giving no indication that they are aware of his presence the way he perceives them as gray silent fragments of a gray still world suggests that they are separate from yet still a part of the world they inhabit note here how hughes's form reflects his meaning as this stanza is three lines long rather than the customary two suggesting the fragmentation of the second line into two shorter ones in doing this he uses the line break to visually separate the horses from their environment while they remain linguistically linked through the repetition of the adjective Gray and the sibilance of silent and still the preponderance of stressed syllables in these two lines which demands that the reader slow down increases this sense of fragmentation the speaker climbs higher I listened in emptiness on the moorage the curlew's tear turned its Edge on the silence a curler is a large wading bird with a long down curved bill and is known for its distinctive and somewhat haunting ascending two-note call Hughes uses the metaphor of a tear which turned its Edge to describe the way it cuts through the silence suggesting the way the Jagged Edge left by something that is torn becomes like a blade the sharpness is enhanced by the plosive alliteration of the sound inter turned the curlers call seems to be the harbinger of the sunrise as slowly detailed Leaf from the darkness the verb leafed describes the way the increasing light enables more detail to be seen in the same way that leaves Sprout and unfurl in Spring this image in combination with the sound of the Curlew Echoes the beginning of the poem where Hughes describes the landscape of being devoid of both leaves and birds all of a sudden the sun orange red red erupted silently the Sun appears Over the Horizon like a volcano ejecting lava albeit without a sound the commas here separate the colors and create two suzurai in the line to evoke of violence which is also enhanced by the consonants of the forceful repulsive sounds the sun splitting to its core appears as a semi-circle bisected by The Horizon as it forcefully tore and flung Cloud shook the gulf open showed blue its expelling of its energy communicated by the verbs erupted splitting flung and Shook and the internal rhyme of core Tor is overwhelming as it has the power to banish the cloud and open up the gulf that is the sky to the extent that the Speaker gets a metaphorical glimpse of the vast workings of the universe in the form of the Big Planet hanging this has such an overwhelming effect on the speaker that it is a literal as well as a spiritual Turning Point I turned this two-syllable line not only evoking the suddenness with which it changes Direction but also marking a definitive moment in the poem he now describes his return Journey stumbling in a fever of a dream down towards the dark wood from the kindling tops the way he stumbles suggests that he is on steady on his feet perhaps momentarily dazzled by the sunlight as he makes his way downhill as well as disconcerted by what he has just witnessed the word kindling relates to the small pieces of dry wood that you use to start a fire and it's just the way in which the tops or the summit of the Hill appears as though it has caught on fire as he returns down towards the wood he encounters the horses for a second time and came the horses there still they stood but now steaming and glistening under the flow of light what still which is working as both an adjective meaning not moving and as an adverb meaning until now indicates that they have remained motionless since he saw them the first time although now the warmth of the sun its flow of light the antithesis of the frost making Stillness of the Twilight Gloom starting to burn off the moisture of the Dew that has settled on them overnight making them Steam and glisten note how structurally this stanza is a mirror image of the seventh stanza which comprised one long line followed by two shorter ones comprising as it does two short lines followed by a third longer line and suggest the way the speaker is retracing his steps the sense of fragmentation remains enhanced by hughes's use of anastrophy here which inverts the usual order of words in a clause the quiet leasing sibilance of still stood and steaming evokes the rising warm moisture into the air Hughes goes on to revisit the imagery from stanza 6. as he describes once more their draped Stone Mains and their tilted hind Hooves which are now stirring under a thaw while all around them the frost showed its fires the repeated adjectives such as draped and tilted is evidence that they still look the same as they did before the oxymoronic and alliterative frost showed its fires suggests the way in which the sun is sparkling through the tiny ice crystals but still the horses made no sound not one snorted or stamped not only are they motionless but they are also silent with their hung heads patient as the horizons High over valleys in the red leveling rays the alliteration of the smooth aspirated sounding hung heads Horizons and high in this simile irrevocably links the steadiness of the horses with the enduring stability of the horizons the red leveling Rays communicate the quality of the early morning light as the sun's Rays travel horizontally rather than vertically as they do in the middle of the day Hughes concludes the poem by juxtaposing this Splendid rural isolation with the din of the crowded streets this image is meant both literally and metaphorically in his journey through life going through the years the faces he expresses his sincere wish that he may still meet my memory in so lonelier Place between the streams and the red clouds hearing curlers hearing the horizons endure in other words he hopes that amongst all the other chaotic memories of events and people that are jostling for his attention like people on a crowded Street he may be able to meet almost like a chance encounter with an old friend the memory of a time when the lonely Cry of a Curlew heralded a highly spiritual experience and a feeling of calm stability thanks for watching if you have any questions please let me know in the comments section below and I'll do my best to answer them don't forget to subscribe to my channel for more videos on English language topics and exam techniques and English literature texts