Explore The Relationship With The Natural World In

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The poem “horses” by Edwin Muir explores the relationship between man and the “brilliant” and “broad-breasted” animal, which is the horse. The poem consists of seven quatrains with rhyming couplets throughout. As Muir narrates the poem, he looks back to the horses of his childhood with a nostalgic feel and conveys his relationship with them through his powerful figurative language and thought provoking choices of words. After reading the first stanza, it is clear on the angle Muir sees these mystical beasts. In the first two lines of this quatrain, Muir describes horses as “lumbering”. The connotations that the reader picks up on would be that horses are slow and tired slow. However it would seem that he is trying to imply is that this is what horses are like to everyone else but him. In the next two lines they’re described as “terrible, wild.. strange.. like magic power”. These words imply that they’re far off the ordinary- there is nothing quite like them. These last two lines make it clear that Muir was terrified of horses in his childhood. The juxtaposition of these two couplets adds effect by forcing the reader to think about how they view horses. This next stanza uses very powerful language to reinforce the way he sees horses. The second line consists of one of the most effective lines of the poem. “When I watched fearful, through the blackening rain”. His use of pathetic fallacy creates very vivid imagery for the reader. Imagining as small boy innocently watching these machine-like creatures work tirelessly, no matter what painful weather they are provided with. They battle on with “their hooves like pistons in an ancient mill” In the next stanza, Muir describes horses as “conquering”. To me the connotation conquering conveys are the importance of horses throughout man kind- potentially winning wars for nations and providing us freedom due to theses
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