The Horses Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABCDEFGHFGIJKLMLNOMA PQNNRSTUVNBWMGXEYQZA 2B2C2D2E2F2G2H2I2J2K 2L2N| rld to sleep | A |
| Late in the evening the strange horses came | B |
| By then we had made our covenant with silence | C |
| But in the first few days it was so still | D |
| We listened to our breathing and were afraid | E |
| On the second day | F |
| The radios failed we turned the knobs no answer | G |
| On the third day a warship passed us heading north | H |
| Dead bodies piled on the deck On the sixth day | F |
| A plane plunged over us into the sea Thereafter | G |
| Nothing The radios dumb | I |
| And still they stand in corners of our kitchens | J |
| And stand perhaps turned on in a million rooms | K |
| All over the world But now if they should speak | L |
| If on a sudden they should speak again | M |
| If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak | L |
| We would not listen we would not let it bring | N |
| That old bad world that swallowed its children quick | O |
| At one great gulp We would not have it again | M |
| Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep | A |
| Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow | P |
| And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness | Q |
| The tractors lie about our fields at evening | N |
| They look like dank sea monsters couched and waiting | N |
| We leave them where they are and let them rust | R |
| 'They'll molder away and be like other loam ' | S |
| We make our oxen drag our rusty plows | T |
| Long laid aside We have gone back | U |
| Far past our fathers' land | V |
| And then that evening | N |
| Late in the summer the strange horses came | B |
| We heard a distant tapping on the road | W |
| A deepening drumming it stopped went on again | M |
| And at the corner changed to hollow thunder | G |
| We saw the heads | X |
| Like a wild wave charging and were afraid | E |
| We had sold our horses in our fathers' time | Y |
| To buy new tractors Now they were strange to us | Q |
| As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield | Z |
| Or illustrations in a book of knights | A2 |
| We did not dare go near them Yet they waited | B2 |
| Stubborn and shy as if they had been sent | C2 |
| By an old command to find our whereabouts | D2 |
| And that long lost archaic companionship | E2 |
| In the first moment we had never a thought | F2 |
| That they were creatures to be owned and used | G2 |
| Among them were some half a dozen colts | H2 |
| Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world | I2 |
| Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden | J2 |
| Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads | K2 |
| But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts | L2 |
| Our life is changed their coming our beginning | N |
Edwin Muir
(1)
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