Names of Horses

Lucy Kemp Welch

Names of Horses

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding 
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul 
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer, 
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields, 
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine 
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres, 
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack, 
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn, 
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load 
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns. 
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill 
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

and lay the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave, 
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground - old toilers, soil makers:

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

Donald Hall




So beautiful. Where do I begin? Everything about this poem is beautiful. It encompasses a lifespan of work: "All Winter your brute shoulders strained against collars", "In April you pulled cartloads", "All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield", "Sundays you trotted the two miles to church", "in the mornings", "and after noon's heat". Within the pattern of work is a relationship not specifically mentioned but as potent a presence as I've ever read. The horse and the man. Their relationship carries the farm forward. There's no question that the horse serves the man's needs, and this is perhaps what makes the poem so moving. Even without direct praise, the catalogue of the horse's work clearly expresses respect. He/she has an honoured place in the centre of the man's life. "You strained", "you pulled", "you mowed", the poem is written not to us, but to the horse, who has a name - a name - a thing that shows a recognition of individuality, of worth, and of relationship. Layer after layer the details make a life for both a horse and a man. And time. Time repeating, cycling, renewing, building. Time as a familiar setting, a rhythm. My favourite line in the whole poem -  "Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass." 

The end of the horse's life is a terrible moment. I don't know who I feel worse for, the horse or the man. And yet, even here I read respect. The man sees his age and pain and knows the time has come. This also is part of the pattern. And here, too, the seasons do their work. Summer makes the horse a monument, blossoms are his canopy in Autumn, and the winter frost heaves his bones. There is a brutal beauty even in this.
 

*For anyone who likes to read about old farming ways, here are a few excellent Rural Memoirs:

"Corderoy", Adrian Bell (the first of a trilogy)
"Farmer's Glory", A.G. Street
"Just Across the Fields", Humphrey Phelps
"Farm of My Childhood: 1925-1941", Mary Roberts (this one has a lot about horses)