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.
Even on the page Donald Hall’s poem “The Names of Horses” (first published in 1978) looks quite orderly and traditional: Seven stanzas of four lines each (the most common stanza in English, called a “quatrain” for four) and one “tail” or extra line at the end.
The lines are longer than usual (lines in this arrangement on the page are usually no more than ten syllables long, with tolerance for varying that but not much). This makes the poem sound a little different from what we’d expect. Read it aloud and you will find your breathing resisting the ongoingness of the syntax.
Once you start reading you notice that the sentences are pretty easy to understand. As you begin to read it, it seems to belong to the genre of “Georgic”: deeper in, you sense an elegy for the farming way of life (which would make it more complex, but we don’t know that at the outset). In a sense, too, compared with self-consciously modern verse, this poem reads like prose. You may note that the sentences are made, as usual, of subjects and verbs and also lots of other verbal units like infinitives (verbs with “to” in front) and participles (–ing words). The syntax is loose, not tight. There’s a feeling of repetition but also of regularity, a sort of continuous ongoingness. A lot happens in the poem, which moves along like a condensed diary of a farmer’s life and the life of his horse.
Looking closer at the lines you may notice that there is a pause somewhere in the middle of each line, though middle is not a mathematical point; the pause is syntactical (marked by a preposition, for instance); it is often marked by a comma but never a period; periods come at the end of the lines. As in the iambic pentameter line, this movable pause in the middle of this longer line changes the speed with which you read the lines and therefore governs the basic music of the poem. (It is often noted that a poem is made up of many units of THIS then THAT, thrust-counterthrust, however you want to put it; it’s a good thing to remember when reading aloud.)
The use of sound clusters is especially notable in the third stanza: “gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack, / and the built hayrack back . . . “ The emphatic accented syllables and the repetition of “ack” suggests something essential about the life of the horse, and by extension the farmer: the patience required to do hard repetitive work. Eventually, the companionship of these workers, humans and horses, deepens our appreciation of the ultimate ground of the poem against which the details convey their singular meanings.
In short, at first reading it feels like an “old-fashioned” poem and in fact that long line – longer that is than the classic iambic ten syllables established in the Renaissance — reaches back before the “modern revolution” brought about by Shakespeare and others.
There are ways of seeing with what care the poem was composed (and why it seems consubstantial with the made things, the tools, used on a farm). The middle of the poem – the line, “a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns” – is one of only two lines in the middle of a stanza with a full stop. As it turns out, this is the “true” center of the poem – true in the numerical sense, and in the sense of “heart” but also true in the sense of “true to . . . . the ultimate understanding of the world of the poem.” The poem is carefully true on several accounts, at several removes.
One more observation, the lines do not rhyme. Thus the “old-fashioned” poem becomes a “blank verse” poem, which has been a major genre since the late 18th century, and in the 20th century, used, importantly for this poem, by Frost, the farmer poet.
Finally, the “extra” tail line is a list of names, a roll call of horses. Just how that “works” the work of the poem will become clearer when we turn to the inner form. Another modern maker of poems, W. B. Yeats, used roll calls to great affect.
Outer form is an analysis of things we can count: the nuts-and-bolts of the thing the poet made. The inventory of things you can count is nigh infinite and we’ve only scratched the surface, but we’ve got a rough idea of how the poem has been put together, what the “rules” are that govern how it works as a piece of language.
Outer form doesn’t tell us everything about the poem: what is not “outer form” is, in a word, “inner form,” but inner form is not as easy to talk about because it is not made up of a lot of discreet items. The inner form of a poem is how the poem engages the mind and feelings of the reader, then moves it outside itself towards a completer understanding of the poem and of itself. Inner form moves from the givens of experience, circumstances, towards a “beyond” that includes and transcends the consciousness of individual man and in some way man as a species, since it engages a deep level of what it means to be human, conscious and mortal, between a perplexcing, mysterious beginning in the midst of things and an unknown mysterious end somehow outside all of that.
The inner form “follows” the way the mind naturally makes contact with the real world by noticing a thing with a sense of surprise or even wonder, then moving closer to it out of curiosity. As the wonder gives way to perplexity, the knower becomes part of what is being known, part of the perplexity: this thing has a hold on you. At this point one makes a decision: to continue in perplexity or to fall back into the state of separation – the ego and the thing – where it started. This would seem to be a safe thing to do, but creative works are creative in part because they refuse the safety of the ego-object dichotomy. Art develops from the point of transcendence of the ego. To go ahead is to move towards an unknown. But if going further is called for, it is because the self has been “called”: the third stage of inner form is a leaving of the separate self in favor of a bigger vision, quest, destiny.
This poem leads the reader away from the comforts of linear “diary” (notice the use of seasons to order the events of the first part), into an order of “nature” which transcends a particular story. This transcendent view was foreshadowed in a phrase that may have escaped the reader’s notice after the middle point of the poem (“the sound of hymns”). The phrase “generation on generation” sounds Biblical so it smoothly follows on the previous phrase about hymns, but it abandons the linear account of this one horse for a short time. Suddenly history is a subject and the human individual, like the horse, a member in the grand class of mortal things.
That different and “hyper” sense of order is picked up in the introductory phrase of the final stanza: “For a hundred and fifty years . . . “ The pronoun “you” would first seem to refer to the “you” in the earlier part of the poem, and it does, but this “you” is now part of a class of “you’s” — that is horses, generations of them. All buried in “the Pasture of dead horses.”
It would have been easier to refuse to take part of this going ahead with the poem; no one wants to face death, especially when facing death means accepting one’s own mortality, as it perhaps always should if “face” be the verb for the encounter with death.
Then the roll-call of the final, extra line. The sense of “excess” in this extra line is fitting: we’ve transcended the singularity of the one horse but only by “understanding” it more fully. It appears that singular beings are marked by excess: they are more than they seem to be.
There’s a similar vision, perhaps sharper here, more imaginatively articulated in its facets, in Wendell Berry’s poem called “Horses.” It ends with a vision of song as the name of this work done with horses on farms: “This work of love rhymes / living and dead. A dance / is what this plodding is. / A song, whatever is said.” Paradox: dancing/ plodding; song/whatever is said: language can not denote the final stage of inner form.
We now see the poem in light of the transcendent difference between finite singulars and the transcending community of love that is not a thing like the horse but still embraces the horse. This final mystery of mortal beings is the ultimate source of emotion in this poem: the sense of things as passing though time to be included, by the poem, in an order that transcends time. Language, like the horse and the poet and the reader, is mortal, but the “names” of horses appeal to a dimension of existence which transcends all-devouring time.
As the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly says in the title of a poem, “The Names of the Dead are Lightning.”
Art is rooted in this sense of wonder at the moreness, starting with the shock that there is anything out there at all, and the wonder of that (this is the first “stop” along the way of inner form). This wonder continues in various transmutations through inner form into the final phase of the wonder of the community of beings, a community that transcends them all. In this poem, this community is clearly a community of love. Like Sunday in the cycle of work, the “hymn” at the center of the poem is an analogue to the transcendent order signified by this very poem. The moreness of the horse, identified by the farmer who loved it, is now part of a greater moreness involving the heart of the generations of readers who have read and understood the poem.
