Edwin Muir: Horses

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Horse Frightened by a Storm: Eugène Delacroix, 1824 (Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest)

Those lumbering horses in the steady plough,

On the bare field -- I wonder why, just now,

They seem terrible, so wild and strange,

Like magic power on the stony grange.

Perhaps some childish hour has come again,

When I watched fearful, through the blackening rain,

Their hooves like pistons in an ancient mill

Move up and down, yet seem as standing still.

Their conquering hooves which trod the stubble down

Were ritual that turned the field to brown,

And their great hulks were seraphim of gold,

Or mute ecstatic monsters on the mould.

And oh the rapture, when, one furrow done,

They marched broad-breasted to the sinking sun!

The light flowed off their bossy sides in flakes;

The furrows rolled behind like struggling snakes.

But when at dusk with streaming nostrils home

They came, they seemed gigantic in the gloam

And warm and glowing with mysterious fire

That lit their smouldering bodies in the mire.

Their eyes as brilliant and as wide as the night

Gleamed with a cruel apocalyptic light.

Their manes the leaping ire of the wind

Lifted with rage invisible and blind.

Ah, now it fades! It fades! And I must pine

Again for that dread country crystalline,

Where the black field and the still-standing tree

Were bright and fearful presences to me.

Rearing Horse: Leonardo da Vinci, 1503-1504 (Royal Library, Windsor)


Jaguar attacking a Horseman Frightened by a Storm: Eugène Delacroix, c. 1855 (Národní Galerie, Prague)

Edwin Muir (1887-1959): Horses, from First Poems, 1925