The Rain Horse

2048 Words9 Pages
The passage starts of with the mention of a ‘wood top, with a silvered grey light coming in behind it’, to create a dramatic effect of what might have been a dreary setting. Because woods are usually so silent, the silvered grey light made it seem as if something out of the ordinary was happening in the woods. ‘The black horse was standing under the oaks, its head high and alert’; this helps Hughes continue with his dramatic effect. With mentioning the colour of the horse, he is using colours as symbolism for the horses nature. White is often thought of as pure, and in this case, the horse’s dark colour is symbolism for its dark nature. ‘It’s ears pricked, watching him’, brings us to the dramatic point of the story. The horse is watching him, which is unusual, and the writer goes on to mention how horses often do not behave this way- ‘A horse sheltering from the rain generally goes into a sort of stupor, tilts a hind hoof and hangs its head and lets its eyelids droop, and so it stays as long as the rain lasts’; this description of a usual horse gives us the image of a bleak day with a horse sheltering itself as it waits out a storm. Because of this long description of what horses often behave like, when Hughes says ‘This horse was nothing like that’, it makes the moment dramatic, and makes the reader wonder why the horse was behaving so strangely. The authors use of a short sentence creates a dramatic effect by getting straight to the point without any details, making the reader eager to read on to find out why the horse was acting the way it was. The author goes on to describe how the horse was looking at the narrator- the words ‘intently’ and ‘standing perfectly still’ were adjectives that differed from the usual behaviour of an animal, and were harsh words that made the moment seem dramatic and scary. ‘It’s soaked neck and flank shining in the hard light’ gave
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