Somewhere in the Dorset countryside we came across a painting.

In a butter-cupped field, against a backdrop of trees and early summer sky, a horse. Like something by George Stubbs, a 19th-century English artist famous for his portraits of equine creatures. “What shall we name him?” I asked my walking companion.

‘Ariel.’

After, along the trail (to The Mitre Inn pub), we collected horse poems. Sylvia Plath’s God’s lioness/How one we grow/Pivot of heels and knees! and Ted Hughes’ ‘Megalith-still’ animals in ‘a world cast in frost,’ their hung heads ‘patient as the horizons.’ It surprised us, how prolifically horses occupied our literary landscape. Imbued, almost always, with a sense of wildness. Even Edwin Muir’s working horses, whose ‘hooves like pistons in an ancient mill’ turned fallowed fields, are ‘glowing with mysterious fire,’ their eyes ‘as brilliant and as wide as night.’

At the pub, my friend offered ‘Horse Latitudes’ by The Doors. Which, obviously, prompted a Jim Morrison impersonation, ably aided by the most excellent local cider. ‘When the still sea conspires an armor,’ we recited in our happy corner, ‘And her sullen and aborted currents breed tiny monsters, true sailing is dead.’

“Do you know what it’s about?”

I didn’t.

“A ship at sea forced to jettison the on-board horses to lighten its load.”

I swiftly called for another drink.

“While we’re on the subject of disturbing horse poem-songs, there’s Patti Smith’s ‘Land’…”

When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he’s being surrounded by/horses, horses, horses, horses/coming in all directions/white shining silver studs with their nose in flames

This epic nine-minute composition tells the story of a boy who is physically attacked (possibly raped), and the subsequent surrealist journey he experiences. Smith, I’m told, based him on the character Johnny in William Burroughs’ The Wild Boys .

We sourced a gentler work from Philip Larkin. In ‘At Grass’ — so technically perfect it’ll make you weep — our provincial poet observes two race horses (although the term ‘horse’ is never once used) in retirement. They begin in anonymity, ‘the eye can hardly pick them out’ in the shade, and he imagines them in the past, cheered and celebrated. At first it seems a lament, of youthfulness lost, then the mood shifts: ‘Do memories plague their ears like flies?’ he asks. ‘They shake their heads.’ For while each summer has stolen away ‘the starting-gates, the crowd and cries,’ it has left them the ‘unmolesting meadows’. The poem transforms into a reflection on the passage of time, a scrutiny of life, its maturity and (hey, it’s Larkin) death. ‘They/Have slipped their names, and stand at ease’ and eventually, so must we all.

Given the literary evidence, clearly something there is about a horse. Why are we moved to such eloquence, even when they’re merely mooching about in fields, munching on grass? Perhaps because we read Black Beauty , Anne Sewell’s sweetly sentimental Victorian novel narrated from the perspective of the titular horse. Or watched Carroll Ballard’s film adaptation of Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion , about the friendship between a shipwrecked boy and horse.

Aren’t they most beautiful of our fellow creatures? Imbued with strength, and poise, and patience. Joey in Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse says, “This one isn’t just any old horse. There’s a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be? I tell you, my friend, there’s divinity in a horse… We don’t belong in the same universe as a creature like this.” In Peter Shaffer’s Equus , this adulation is taken to the extreme by Alan Strang, a 17-year-old with a pathological religious fascination for horses. In true Shaffer style, the play gloriously expands. The psychiatrist’s struggle to treat the boy and return him to ‘normal’ forms a central thematic concern — an Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy. The conflict between the rational and irrational, the orderly and chaotic. “The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes — all right,” he says, “It is also the dead stare in a million adults.”

Herein, I think, lies a hint.

That may help explain why despite centuries of domestication, for field and carriage, for 440-yard races, horses still remain symbols of freedom. Because, to our thrill, they are also inexplicably untameable. Even in their gallop around the gated track, there is the feeling they might never halt. In the jump over the bar is the constant danger of the fall. The wild rearing. The sudden stubborn refusal. Glimpsed in a field they are miraculous. Their acknowledgement of you is a gift. Nothing less. Or as James Wright calls it ‘A Blessing.’ In his poem, two ponies come out of the willows, ‘bow[ing] shyly as wet swans.’ There is much tenderness here; one nuzzles his left hand, and a ‘light breeze moves [him] to caress her long ear/That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.’ It ends with an image of explosive beauty and untrampled happiness:

Suddenly I realise

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

For that one moment we all inhabit the same universe.

( Janice Pariat is the author of Seahorse )

Follow Janice on Twitter @janicepariat

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