Essays and Criticism
A seemingly unblinking and unsentimental paean to the generations of horses which have labored on the Hall farm, Donald Hall's poem, "Names of Horses," praises the idea of work, particularly physical work, as much as it praises the horses themselves. By describing the typical life of one family horse, Hall characterizes all of them and their importance to his family.
For Hall, work is what we do during life, both animals and humans. When we can no longer work, we lose much of our usefulness, our reason for being in the world.
Hall begins the poem with a description of the strenuous nature of the horse's work, detailing how the animal "strained against collars, padding / and steerhide" to carry wood that would ensure its owner's warmth for the next winter. By addressing the horse directly, and by cataloguing the various kinds of work the horse did for its owner, the speaker creates a sense of intimacy between himself and the animal. Readers are witnesses to this intimacy, in a position not unlike that of audience members listening to a eulogy. This poem, however, is as much elegy as it is eulogy, celebrating as it (implicitly) laments. By focusing on the physical details of the horse's work, the speaker underscores the effort that goes into the labor. It is this effort which marks the value of the work, and of the horse, for the speaker. Implicit in this poem is the awe that the speaker feels towards the horse, and his gratitude for the work the horse had done to keep his ancestors alive.
In addition to describing the horse's work, the speaker also describes the work of the seasons. In the opening stanza he details the work the horses do in winter, and in the next stanza moves to spring and summer. In the second and third stanzas he names the time of day and the kind of work the horse does during the day. Accretion of this kind of detail underscores the ritualistic nature of the work, both the animal's and the seasons', and it draws attention to the relationship between creature (i.e., human and animal) work and non-creature (i.e., natural processes) work and the relent-lessness of time itself. Work, this poems implies, is the defining element of all life.
The fourth stanza again highlights the horse's value to its owners, describing its activity in human terms, when the speaker writes how on Sundays the horse "grazed in the sound of hymns" as it waited for its owners to finish the worship service. This metaphor, striking in its use of synes-thesia (uncharacteristic for this poem), contributes to the eulogistic tone of the poem. This stanza introduces the idea—only implicit in the poem up until now—that it is not one horse we are reading about but rather one horse representing generations of horses. Hall writes: "Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the window sill / of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass." This simile is fitting, for it suggests the ways in which individual identity folds into a kind of generic use-value when considered over time. Put another way, it is not an individual horse that the speaker describes and praises, but rather all horses which work. Just as the ocean's waves wear away the identifying markers of glass (e.g., the ridges, the ink, the shape itself), so too is the horse wearing away the identifying markers of the wooden window sill. Both the original wood and glass can be seen as signifying individual identity which, over time, is leveled into a type.
The fifth...
(This entire section contains 1458 words.)
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stanza develops the speaker's utilitarian attitude towards the horse and towards work. When in the eyes of its owner the horse has outlived its usefulness to its owner, it is time to kill the horse.
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.
Interestingly, the speaker describes the horse's death in such a way that the reader has two conflicting responses. The first one is empathy for both owner and horse because the horse is hurting and because the owner has to kill him, there being no alternative. The second one, revulsion at the owner's act of killing, stems from the detailed description of the act and of the owner's calculated approach towards the killing. Hall's use of assonance (lame/graze; shoulders/hurt; brain/grave), consonance (stubble/sandy/pond; summer/dent/ ground/monument), and alliteration (stood/shuddering/skin; fired/fell) underline the visceral and graphic nature of the image and contribute to readers' feeling of shock. That the horse's killer/owner had already prepared the grave for the horse to fall into once shot highlights the owner's—over generations, each a Hall ancestor—own practical attitude towards work, even the work of killing. The matter-of-fact description of the killing, the efficient way in which it was carried out, and the poem's final image before the roll call of names, describing the horses as "old toilers, soil makers," all underscore the primary value of the horses to the Hall family as workers. The horse's work continues even in death. If in life the horse worked on nature, in death nature works on the horse. His bones nourished the "roots of pine trees" and "yellow blossoms flourished above ... [him] in autumn." The last stanza demonstrates that even the speaker's impulse towards eulogizing the horses, towards remembering them as family members, is tempered by his description of what they have done for the family. The final line, a lament cataloguing the names of the Hall family's horses over the last century and a half, is also praise for work well done. Calling out the horses' names can be read as a way of evoking their presence, making their image palpable both to himself and to readers of the poem. Giving the horses names also marks a way of "personalizing" our image of the horses.
Hall himself is consumed with the idea of work, thinking and writing about it often. In his book, Life Work (which he thought about naming "Work and Death"), he draws a distinction between himself and manual laborers, claiming that he had never "worked" a day in his life. Hall writes: "I've never worked with my hands or shoulders or legs. I never stood on the line in Flint among the clangor and stench of embryonic Buicks for ten hours of small operations repeated on a large machine." This kind of activity, the "dirty work" of the body, is what the horses do, spreading manure, mowing grass, transporting wood. Hall praises it because it is precisely what he does not do. Coming from a farming family who made their living working with their hands, Hall respects manual labor to the point of romanticizing it. For Hall, work is what we do during life, both animals and humans. When we can no longer work, we lose much of our usefulness, our reason for being in the world. And just as work unites humans and animals, so too does death, the great leveler. In "The Black Faced Sheep," a poem appearing in the same volume as "Names of Horses," Hall writes
that the rich farmer, though he names the farm for
himself,
takes nothing into his grave; that even if people praise us, because we are
successful,
we will go under the ground to meet our ancestors collected there in the
darkness; that we are all of us sheep, and death is our
shepherd, and we die as the animals die.
Hall wrote this poem and "Names of Horses" after quitting academia in 1975 and returning to the place of his birth, Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire in 1975. Much of his poetry after this date is rooted in place and family and more concrete, more personal than his previous writing. His poems frequently detail the work of the body, the earth, rather than the mind, and remind us of the material world in which we live and the bodies we inhabit.
Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students,
Gale Group, 2000.
Chris Semansky's most recent collection of poems, Blindsided, published by 26
Books of Portland, Oregon, has been nominated for an Oregon Book Award.
