a horse for the sun essay

Grasshopper versus Horse for the Sun

I shall never forget that evening in my life. We had to walk nearly 5 km in the dusk to reach that little, sleepy tribal village at the foot of a hill. I, in the capacity of a facilitator, was with a group of activists working with a forest tribe, the Forest Shepherds.

• Post author By D.R. Nagaraj
• Post date 12 November 2020

‘Grasshopper on Rock’; Wen Liang, 15th century.

Grasshopper versus a horse for the sun —a critical narrative on social change in kannada fiction.

D.R. Nagaraj

Editor’s note: My father used to get the India International Quarterly, and I would go through it cursorily when it arrived. When the essay below by D R Nagaraj came out in 1992, I was still finishing my DPhil in Oxford, and had published my first novel the previous year. I hadn’t heard of Nagaraj: there was no reason to, unless you were in a particular academic circuit. I had sensed, in Oxford, that the social sciences was becoming the new intellectual hegemony in India, but it was still possible to ignore it and spend most of one’s time grappling with literature, cinema, and music.

Still, Nagaraj’s essay interested me, and I took note; it came across as being more intellectually alive, more involved, than the critical and academic work I had generally encountered in India. It was also, I now see, entirely non-academic. Its intellectual compulsions are deep-seated rather than professional.

It was published alongside A K Ramanujan and Manu Shetty’s magnificent translation of U R Ananthamurthy’s short story ‘A Horse for the Sun’ (‘Suryana Kudure’ in the original Kannada). This made sense, as Nagaraj’s essay is a discussion of, among other things, two literary works: a novel by Devanoor Mahadeva, Kusuma Baale that had been published in 1988, and Ananthamurthy’s story. The novel’s non-narrative form, which excites Nagaraj, is described by him below. The short story is about the return of a writer, Anantha, to his village, where, by chance, he runs into his childhood friend Venkata in the market, buying vegetables, oblivious to him and to the world in general. This obliviousness is both alluring and perplexing to Anantha: what, after all, is Venkata contented about? He hasn’t achieved anything. If anything, as Anantha finds out, Venkata’s family life is falling apart. Where does his capacity, and taste, for bliss come from? Is he some kind of visionary – the one who, at the story’s end, says, pointing at a grasshopper: ‘Look! A horse for the sun!’ – or an oaf? Anantha is coerced by Venkata into having an oil massage administered on his head. He resists – then surrenders. The narrator’s record of the polysyllabic, hypnotic gibberish that Venkata utters while administering the massage must surely be one the high points of literature, and literary translation.

When, at the end of the 1990s, I was putting together material for the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, I thought I should return to that issue of the IIC Quarterly. Rereading Ananthamurthy’s story confirmed that it needed to be in the anthology; and Nagaraj’s essay, on a second reading, was just as engaging as it had been earlier, and I made reference to it in the headnote I wrote for the story. Though I didn’t know it, Nagaraj had died in 1998, at the age of 44, around the time I began making these investigations.

When this website for ‘literary activism’ went live in August this year, I thought I should revisit the essay, just in case it could be retrieved for new readers. A great deal had happened since I’d last read it two decades ago. Literature, worldwide, had become a category that looked for a home in other domains, disciplines, and bodies of knowledge (the market; history; the social sciences; race, nation, and identity), but in itself was placeless and silent; in India, the social sciences hegemony, which had little understanding of the literary except on its own terms, was still powerful, though it was being arraigned by a government of the extreme right; the question of caste had become a major intellectual preoccupation, and caste and Dalit studies was a significant academic discipline. The last is worth mentioning because Kusuma Baale, the novel Nagaraj champions in his essay, is written by a Dalit writer. Nagaraj himself was of the Devanga or weaver caste, and, throughout the essay, sees this fact – though he never addresses it overtly – both from the outside and inside. He wants to reserve the right to be many things: a ‘student of literature’; a person from, for the want of a better term, a ‘non-upper caste’ category; a Kannada intellectual, which appears to be an identity that carries with it connotations and possibilities indicated by the freewheeling, humorous, and ‘serious’ registers of this essay. Two other things: Nagaraj had become well-known in the last two decades, appropriated by a mainstream in academia that would have been interested in what he said on caste or, say, Gandhi and Ambedkar, and superficially conscious of, and essentially incurious about, his investment in poetics.

Since my third rereading (which I undertook after I’d relocated the essay), I have read it twice while making very light copy edits for typos. Each time I’ve noticed startling things which I hadn’t before, which make both the essay and its author anomalous in the present academic climate of piety, and hostility to the imagination.

The first is Nagaraj’s humour, which creates a contextual, self-reflexive frame for his journey with some Dalit activists, including Krishna (who is his interlocutor throughout), towards a ‘lower-caste’ village; it also fashions a frame for his own pronouncements. Humour allows him to view both Krishna’s politics and his own state of animation – ‘My enthusiasm knew no bounds, unchecked by irony… my non-stop pompous lecture’ – with affectionate detachment.

The second is Nagaraj’s distaste for the European Enlightenment, and what he sees to be its offspring: rationality; realism (in the novel) – in short, his impatience with an overdetermined consciousness. Against the Enlightenment he posits poetry. In this, he exhibits the classic characteristics of the Indian modern, and of the non-Anglophone Indian writer in particular, rather than the postcolonial academic, for whom the oral and the fantastical are significant (overdetermined) non-Western political categories, but for whom the poetic remains unaddressed. Nagaraj’s interest in Kusama Baale isn’t postcolonial, reliant on ideas of identity: it’s formal. This brings us to his delineation of his difference – despite the proximity of their caste background – from Krishna, the activist. Krishna, Nagaraj implies, sees poetry as a luxury; and why shouldn’t he? For Krishna, a scepticism to do with the artistic dimensions of the cultural inheritances of his caste goes hand in hand with his sharp awareness of their cruelty and oppressiveness. Both the English language and rationality are important instruments for Krishna: they’re ‘empowering’, in today’s language.

Nagaraj shrewdly contrasts Krishna’s way of reading Kusuma Baale with his own: ‘He was interested in the content of the novel, whereas I was more keen on discussing the return to the folk-roots phenomenon’

Nagaraj’s portrayal of Krishna emerges from a sense of intellectual history marked – as the entire essay is – by distance and humour. This leads to his distinctive characterisation of Krishna and his politics – of the tenor, in fact, of both caste and radical activism: ‘Processes of social change in Karnataka have produced individuals like Krishna. For them literary judgement cannot be divorced from the day-to-day political situations…’ And a few paragraphs down: ‘These, in sum, are the attitudes of the modernists and radicals who are products of historical change and the will to change.’ Something obvious is being pointed out, something that’s often left out of at least the Indian Anglophone account of intellectual history: that activists and political action don’t just produce change – they are products of history themselves. For Nagaraj, it’s history, not history-writers, that is the author – again, this creates a qualifying frame. Nagaraj constantly compares Krishna to a fictional character, Chenna, in Kusuma Baale, to point to a context of contingency that Krishna himself doesn’t seem aware of, but which might possibly be illuminated by a novel.

To become aware of the historicity and contingency of our ideas and actions is to gain an angularity that’s often lacking in academia: an angularity that comes from knowing that we aren’t only the students, recorders, and writers of history, but that we have ourselves emerged from a particular history and time. Once we sense that, we don’t need to feel imprisoned within a particular intellectual dispensation as if it were ‘true’, inevitable, or timeless. I noticed a peculiarly unexpected relevance in one of Nagaraj’s many reflections on his young companion: ‘Krishna, my friend, is only a more sophisticated and articulate version of Chenna. For him the art of playing drums is linked with the humiliating task of carrying dead animals.’ This links Nagaraj’s Krishna to another Krishna, T M, a Carnatic musician and writer (a Brahmin and a critic of the Brahminical), whose latest book, on the making of drums in South India, emerges from an ethos that Nagaraj noticed coming into existence almost three decades ago. His Krishna throws light on both T M Krishna and a generation for which the possibility of surrender that either poetry or a cultural tradition – like music – might offer is foreclosed by the control of an overdetermined historical consciousness that’s conscious of everything (injustice; everyday practice; ritual) except its own formation by, and place in, history.

Nagaraj ends his essay with a wry but impassioned account of the liberation that Venkata’s oil-massage – and poetry – comprises. He hints at a critique that is hardly ever heard in discussions to do with caste: that an overdetermined Dalit self-consciousness can become, if it becomes sovereign, as immediate a tyrant, a sovereign, for the Dalit as any identifiable enemy outside the self. ‘If at all Krishna ever agrees to describe the grasshopper as a horse for the sun, it would mean a radical change in our political and social discourses. He would be a different man.’ These are challenging and courageous statements, and they represent the view of a tiny minority that has had a long history in modern Indian literatures and their poetics, but is now, if it exists at all, without voice: a minority that argued not only against Enlightenment rationality, whatever political form it took (‘nationalism’ is the form Tagore argued against), but against the constraints of any form of self-consciousness that became akin to what Ananthamurthy calls the ‘tiger’ – with the aim of cowing, through rhythm and poetry, the tiger to submission.

The figure of the coiled Nagaraja in the Badami cave temple, Karnataka, from the 6th century.

[Two works of Kannada fiction, Kusuma Baale , a novel, and ‘Suryana Kudure’, a short story, have tackled the problem of social change in two distinctly different ways. Both were written in the mid-80s and they were, immediately, accorded the status of classics. The author of Kusuma Baale , Devanoor Mahadeva (b 1946), is an untouchable by birth and presently an important leader of the Dalit movement. An outstanding fiction writer, he makes his living as a farmer near Mysore. The author of ‘Suryana Kudure’, Prof. U.R. Anantha Murthy (b 1932), is one of our important writers. The present article discusses the theme of social change as explored in these works.]

I shall never forget that evening in my life. We had to walk nearly 5 km in the dusk to reach that little, sleepy tribal village at the foot of a hill. I, in the capacity of a facilitator, was with a group of activists working with a forest tribe, the Forest Shepherds. If you are a stickler for methodological rigour, it is very difficult to describe that village as a tribal one. The community of people that lives there is no longer tribal. Caught up in the process of a tribe transforming itself into a lower caste, it is a classic example of the phenomenon that has been referred to by the Marxist historian D.D. Kosambi, in his studies of Indian history. They only have the memory of a tribe and it clashes bitterly with their modern experience.

The forest of the region had disappeared long ago, leaving only traces of thorny bush and shrub. The district Tumkur was facing a severe drought for the fourth consecutive year. We must have crossed at least four or five tanks totally dried up, looking like huge feet with sores and wounds in the sinking light of the sun. My group of rural development activists was intensely debating the patterns and consequences of social change in Karnataka. An activist, Shiva, lamented that the villagers were just not interested in maintaining the old tanks and lakes. Representative democracy of post-independent Karnataka has taken away the spirit of participatory democracy,which was very much an integral part of traditional society, he continued. The desilting and maintenance of tanks were the responsibility of the entire village. There are more than 27,000 tanks and most of them are dying now, Shiva moaned. We were not in a mood to listen to the said activist who was more attached to the old India. ‘Death of a tank, Saar,’ he said, ‘means a maimed village.’

I, a professional student of literature, was holding forth, while walking, on the formal innovations of Devanoor Mahadeva’s latest novel Kusuma Baale (1988). I was quite excited by the work, written by one of the most talented writers of Kannada, a Dalit, which had sought to question, not all that gently, the very foundations of the traditional novel. The author had called it Katha Kavya (Narrative Verse). The formal experimentation of the novel has its roots in the traditional folk narratives which seek to dissolve the difference between prose and verse. Enveloped by layers of dust which rose from the road, I argued that the parameters of realism could never faithfully reflect and communicate the psyche and the world-views of lower castes. Realism to them is neither reliable nor real. One has to break with realism to get an entry to the gods, goddesses, spirits, myths and dreams of these communities. Realism, rooted in Western inspiration, carries within it certain restrictions. These act as a kind of censoring mechanism to prevent any meaningful encounter between the philosophy and practice of the arts of the lower castes, and (Ed. there’s possibly a word missing here) the realist novel as a documentation of life. For the first time in Kannada, Mahadeva had made it happen! Here the spirits of the lamp, Jothammas speak the language of human beings and they even narrate stories.

My enthusiasm knew no bounds, unchecked by irony. The activists listened to all this silently, without reacting to it. Even then I could not fail to notice a feeling of distress on the face of another activist friend, Krishna. He too had read the novel, and only once during my non-stop pompous lecture had intervened to say that the theme of the novel focuses on the violent conflict between the upper and lower castes. The novel has only reflected, he remarked, the increasing conflict between the untouchables and caste Hindus in rural Karnataka. He was interested in the content of the novel, whereas I was more keen on discussing the return to the folk-roots phenomenon. For me it was a very authentic effort to escape the clutches of colonialism. It is true that Frantz Fanon has warned the Africans about the inherent political dangers involved in such an enterprise…

The debate stopped. We had reached the village by 7 in the evening. After a humble meal at the house of the Headman of the village, we sat down for a real feast of folk performances. Both men and women sang folk lyrics and passages from oral epics. The Kannada language was at its primordial best. Even in the midst of poetic trance, I did not fail to notice that Krishna was looking very uncomfortable. I realised suddenly that he was from the same village. Krishna had fought with the whole village when he stubbornly refused to observe the traditional rituals and practices. He was nothing if not a radical.

The conflict had turned violent when Krishna’s pregnant wife had to stay alone in a hut to deliver her child, as was the practice with the caste. Krishna protested and admitted his wife to the nearby Government hospital. This had enraged the elders of his caste and he was forced to leave the village. This was his first visit to the village after the bitter feud; all this came back to me with force.

Once the performances were over, the Headman himself rushed towards Krishna. There was a melee and many youths in the village wanted to break Krishna’s skull. I intervened and protested. The Headman and other elders of the village argued that it was their internal affair and we better stay away from it. We did not yield. Finally, I managed to pull him out of the scene and we left the village immediately.

We walked back to NH4 to get some transport, possibly a truck, to reach Bangalore. My mind refused to connect things. I talked about Kusuma Baale again, but this time with less enthusiasm, describing the novel’s battle royale with realism in the use of language. Realism can’t accept the fusion of poetry and prose. After all, the Enlightenment, father of realism, had treated poetry with deep suspicion. Hobbes abhorred deviationist practices of poetry in terms of language. It was even considered a feminine discourse, a thing to be monitored and controlled.

In Kusuma Baale the style becomes an end in itself and it weaves myriad patterns which defy translation. This has also lent a great deal of political value to the novel in terms of its refusal to become a commodity of literary consumerism, I argued. This time Krishna did cut short my monologue in a bitter and passionate tone.

‘D.R. Saar, didn’t you see the violence of the villagers’ reaction? The enchanting beauty of the epics and narratives of my caste is organically linked to their value system, which is by and large detrimental to the interests of their own folk. It is opposed to change. If you want to use their art forms or narrative forms, you should also become an insider to their value system. You can’t separate the two. You can’t be authentic in that case.’

Krishna had stated his case clearly. In these days of social change, a major problem faced by contemporary Kannada writing is the ultimate contradiction between traditional forms of culture and social experience. This contradiction assumes frightening forms, particularly when the social experience is judged from the viewpoint of radical politics. Processes of social change in Karnataka have produced individuals like Krishna. For them literary judgement cannot be divorced from the day-to-day political situations.

Mahadeva had chosen one particular way of handling this contradiction. A sure way of enhancing the self-respect of humiliated communities like the Dalits is to revitalise their cultural forms. But modernists and radicals, particularly the Ambedkarites, resent such efforts. For them any attempt to see creativity in traditional Hindu folk culture is tantamount to support the unjust society it has sustained.

A similar controversy rages between two groups of radical scholars regarding the attitude to be adopted towards folk culture. Here the debate is localised to a discussion on Bhutaradhana 1 of Dakshina Kannada (Coastal Karnataka). Dalit radicals like Dr Arvind Malagathi seriously challenge any attempt to see radical meanings and motifs in the cult of Bhutas . Whatever motif of protest is found in this form has already been explained by anthropologists as rituals of rebellion. Read Evans-Pritchard or Max Gluckman to understand this. It is only a ritual; a safety-valve mechanism, perfected by the system to guarantee its survival and growth. On the other hand, the group represented ably by Dr Vivek Rai, Purushothma Bilimale and Chinnappa Gowda, in understandable enthusiasm, upholds Bhutaradhana as a radical practice.

It dawned on me that Krishna after all, was voicing misgivings, widely shared by movements for radical social change, about traditional culture. It also occurred to me that life and literature had met and clashed in that conversation. In other words, Krishna was talking exactly like Chenna, the untouchable boy in Kusuma Baale who had fallen in love with an upper caste girl, Kusuma, and had even fathered her child. For Krishna alias Chenna, social change does not necessarily mean upward social mobility; but it definitely means violating taboos of the caste system. Man-woman love knows no caste or class, true, but it has been conditioned by forces of caste and class. The college-educated Chenna naturally suspects anything that is connected with the culture of his past. He is seen carrying an English newspaper when he meets the arch-conservative Brahmin. English becomes a weapon in itself.

Krishna, my friend, is only a more sophisticated and articulate version of Chenna. For him the art of playing drums is linked with the humiliating task of carrying dead animals. The joy of singing oral epics is associated with, by tradition, the insult of the artist standing outside the houses of upper caste landlords with a begging bowl. Old culture means humiliation; self-respect, in this case, essentially means repudiating one’s cultural past. These, in sum, are the attitudes of the modernists and radicals who are products of historical change and the will to change.

For them change means writing in the socially respectable genres and modes of literature. Realism is their natural ally; when the Krishnas and Chennas turn writers, they prefer to use that mode. To them, mimetic contract and empirical verifiability, the cornerstones of realism, offer perfect ways of presenting and evaluating their experiences. No wonder Realism is the most important and authentic mode of writing for the writers of radical literary movements, Dalit and Bandaya 2

In his novel, Mahadeva has rightly sought to turn things upside down. He has realised that even the rebel has to have a tradition of memory. Social change in the modern context, given the ideologies of aping the powerful, could also lead to obliteration of cultural memory. Krishna and Chenna would feel perfectly happy to use the standardised linguistic registers of the mass media. They have lost the capacity to invoke their memory. And they don’t feel sad about this—for the present. Yet in their collective memory, which has shaped the everyday living speech of the community, images and symbols exist of a very different kind.

Mahadeva has established organic links with his collective memory. Here radicalism lies in his capacity to dissociate the meaning and form of the arts in the collective memory from the context of performing them. The context of their performances, folklorists will do well to remember, has been a demeaning context in the larger political sense.

Krishna, in one of his moments of despair, had screamed that night:

I want to forget all this, I want to forget their gods, their folk epics, their violence.

After a while, he shouted again, this time with more force and determination. ‘If I don’t escape from this memory, I will become a quietist, incapable of any action like the old man Kuriyayya in Kusuma Baale .’ He had uttered the unspeakable truth. For modernists, quietism or inaction is the leprosy of the soul.

In U.R. Ananthamurthy’s ‘Suryana Kudure’ (‘A Horse for the Sun’), Ananthu, the narrator, is also horrified by this experience of quietism or inaction. In our conversation Krishna had argued that the highest ideal of our traditional culture is nothing but inaction. It is also a state of perfect bliss transcending all forms of rationality and discrimination.

In ‘Suryana Kudure’ the battle lines are drawn at the very outset; the two conflicting characters, Ananthu and Hade Venkata, have understood each other too well to begin on any false moves. For Ananthu, the narrator, any gesture of forgiving after having acquired historical knowledge is an impossibility. From the beginning of the story he is annoyed with the ‘simpleton’ Venkata; although the original Kannada word ‘Hade’ 3 has more complex implications. What follows is a bitter battle of descriptions. By describing the other in a certain way, it is hoped that he would be reduced to the state described. Ananthu wishes to evaluate Hade Venkata’s character in a certain way by providing the reader with a set of descriptions:

Why should someone like him father children? Live as the butt of every passerby’s joke? I began to think: the village idiocy that Marx spoke of, which is the cause of this country remaining backward… and so on, Venkata seemed to symbolise for me everything that lived in a state of inertia. I tried as seriously as possible to expound to Venkata my anxieties about the stagnation in this country that I had been sharing of late with my friends. But is he the kind who would listen? (‘Suryana Kudure’, translated by Manu Shetty and A.K. Ramanujan)

The strong point of ‘Suryana Kudure’ is that Ananthu’s viewpoint does not succeed in annihilating Hade Venkata. In sharp contrast to the narrator’s anxiety, Venkata is quite relaxed; and it seems as though he is shaped by a different cultural mould. He describes himself as ‘a devotee of Kali, and so even her wrath is a blessing to me. Thus have I managed to remain blissful in this earthly existence.’ Anxiety is countered with bliss.

Social change is the theme of both Kusuma Baale and ‘Suryana Kudure’, and they have many other things in common. Differences between the two are on the surface itself and we can return to them later. Interestingly, one of the minor characters of Kusuma Baale , Kuriyayya, a Dalit, has grown into a full-blooded Brahmin—Hade Venkata or Venkata krishna Joysa. In the eyes of their society, both seem to be utterly useless; but the contempt of others hasn’t prevented them from developing their own philosophy of life. The ridicule has not destroyed them. It is not all that surprising that ‘passivity’ is the central state of existence to both of them, for the upper and lower castes are organically linked to each other in traditional culture. Call it coercion or consent, the fact is that they are organically linked. Dalit activists in Kusuma Baale are amused and annoyed by the world-views of Kuriyayya; it is too weird for them to take it seriously. But with the narrator in ‘Suryana Kudure’, the case is different.

Kuriyayya traces the problem of hurt egos, in this instance social or caste ego, at the root of the conflict between caste Hindus and untouchables. Through a story on the Dalits kidnapping upper-caste women and living with them merrily in some mythical past, he explains the deep-rooted hatred that has poisoned the relationship between these communities. Being an untouchable himself, Kuriyayya refuses to take sides. He says both the communities are at fault. So he rejects the notion of ego itself, be it collective or individual.

Explicit intellectual encounters are not one of the strong points of Kusuma Baale , and the author leaves Kuriyayya at that. But the narrator in ‘Suryana Kudure’ takes on Hade Venkata with brutal force, and challenges him in a cruel way.

‘Hey, you fool. Can you live without an ego? Even a saint needs an ego.’ Saying this, I thought—without destroying the likes of Venkata, there is no electricity, no dams, no penicillin, no dignity, no respect, no joy of sex, no woman won, no peaks, no aircraft, no evolution, no memory, no passion, no joy.

The tug of war between the two acquires more abstract forms, and it is eventually presented as a war between two irreconcilable life-styles and world-views. All other characters in the story are either hysterical or on the verge of despair. Only Hade Venkata is an ocean of tranquillity. The narrator has accused him of passivity, but, in the concrete context of the story, Hade Venkata is far from that. He moves from victory to victory in the story in an unobtrusive way. What gets ripped up is the rationalist mechanism of the narrator. In his battle against Ananthu, the weapons employed by Hade Venkata belong to the world of Panjurli and Jettiga spirits and fire-spitting Kali. Of course, Ananthu also concedes that ‘he had a personal philosophy too, shaped in the presence of the various spirits of the land.’ One of the ambitions in Hade Vankata’s life is to bring around a tiger and pacify it with an oil massage. He would grab it by its whiskers and beginning with its forehead, he would gently massage it. Faced with a tiger, once, a long time ago, Hade Venkata had passed out. But he has grown stronger in the meanwhile.

The great irony of the story lies in the art of now presenting Ananthu himself as the tiger! He too had wished Hade’s destruction to pave the road for progress and change. But the massage philosopher doesn’t treat the narrator as his enemy. Finally, Venkata succeeds in grabbing Ananthu, the tiger, and begins with his forehead. The gentle act of massage is not all that gentle in the symbolic sense, for it becomes the sacred act of washing away several layers of ideological dust that have enveloped Ananthu. In this crucial part, the story makes a great leap to escape from the chains of realist narration. The purpose of the realist prose is to place enough material in the body of fiction to enable the reader to understand the manners and morals of a certain individual. But when Hade Venkata forces himself to the centre of the story, he doesn’t do it exactly as a value system, but as sheer poetry. The narrator loses his power to describe, to evaluate, which means to dominate, Hade Venkata.

It takes several pages to describe what exactly happens in the oil massage. Ananthu has also forgotten how to invoke collective memory. A sort of amnesia has taken him over totally. In the massage Venkata makes Ananthu forget his present self. Amnesia is used against amnesia and finally Ananthu begins a significant journey, led by Venkata, to reach those forgotten realms of existence.

Ananthu, Ananthu, you have now entered the forest. Entered the forest… in the forest, tree, tree, tree…In front of you a tiny plant. On the plant, a leaf, on the leaf something is springing and leaping, springing and leaping… like this one day, long ago… (you) stood watching…You stood watching the sun’s horse… On its humped back the big sun lightly sat, gently sat… Listen to what the sun’s horse has to say… Ananthana carrying the sun on his back… Now it’s gone… gone Anger’s gone, arrogance’s gone. Love of money’s gone. Pride of name’s gone. Everything’s gone.

A few weeks ago I asked my activist friend, Krishna, whether he would ever describe an ordinary grasshopper as a horse for the sun. He replied in the negative, and surprised me by saying that the ending of the story could be read as annihilation of the reasoning faculties of the narrator.

If at all Krishna ever agrees to describe the grasshopper as a horse for the sun, it would mean a radical change in our political and social discourses. He would be a different man. Krishna gets furious at the very mentioning of this possibility…

1. Rev. W. Reev in 1858 had described Bhuta as ‘ghost, a demi-god, evil-spirits’. In 1992 Prof. A.K. Ramanujan has modified it as ‘demonic divinities’. Bhutaradhana is a ritual whose celebration ranges from a single day to a whole week. Dr Chinnappa Gowda, a folklorist, calls this a ‘ritualistic complex’ to indicate the range of things it has: sacrificial killings, music, poetry, theatre and dance. 2. Dalit and Bandaya are the two most important radical movements in present-day Kannada literature. Dalit writers are, mostly, from untouchable castes. Devanoor Mahadeva and Siddalingaiah are two significant personalities of this movement. Bandaya is the movement of young leftist writers and its important writers are Baragoor Ramachandrappa, Kum. Veerabhadrappa and Kalegowda Nagawara. Both these schools of writing began in the mid 70s. Various forms of social and economic exploitation are the central themes of their literature. 3. In the usage ‘Hade’ means irresponsible and useless.

First published in the India International Centre Quarterly , MONSOON 1992, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Monsoon 1992).

A version of this essay was subsequently included in The Flaming Feet and other essays: the Dalit Movement in India by D R Nagaraj, published by Permanent Black.

It’s reproduced here with the kind permission of the IIC Quarterly and Permanent Black.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Thank you for Subscribe Literary Activism.

• ‘English New Year’ and other poems
• End-of-the-Year Counter-Question
• Toward an Infrathin Reading/Writing Practice

Quick Links

• Symposium 1
• Symposium 2
• Symposium 3
• Symposium 4

A Personal Anthology

Writers, critics and others dream-edit a personal anthology of their favourite short stories

‘A Horse for the Sun’, by U.R. Anantha Murthy

I read this story when I was studying with Amit Chaudhuri – who edited the anthology it comes from – at the University of East Anglia, and I found it moving then, as I find it moving now. It’s an enquiry into modernity and authenticity, and into the possibility of ever ‘going back’. The narrator is an Indian writer, thoroughly urbanized, who visits his childhood village and bumps into an old schoolfriend, Venkata. Always a clown as a youngster, Venkata has grown into a holy fool, a village idiot who acts as a herbalist, amateur nurse to the ungrateful sick, and butt for his exasperated wife and volatile son. His forte is the oil bath, an intense Ayurvedic massage, which the narrator submits to with embarrassment. “Is he a madcap or a hypocrite or a scraggly-bearded saint?” he wonders, as Venkata dances around him, anointing him and drumming out intricate rhythms on his head and body. As with Simpson’s story, the epiphany is minor key, and doubtless temporary, but it is enough to make the reader squint anew at their own assumptions. The title refers to the Kannada name for a grasshopper.

(read in  The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature , where it is translated from the Kannada by Manu Sherry and A.K. Ramanujan.)

Share this:

Leave a comment cancel reply.

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

Essay On Horse

500 words essay on horse.

A horse is a swift and strong animal. It can easily run long distances. If you look at history, you will know the important part they played in it due to their loyalty. Moreover, they also helped and saved their masters. For instance, Chetak was a renowned horse. In addition, Arabian horses are popular worldwide. Through an essay on horse, we will learn more about them.

All About Horses

A horse is a vegetarian and domestic animal. It is very beneficial as well. A horse has four feet, two eyes, a nose, two ears and a tail. Their feet are quite slim but really strong. It allows them to run fast and for long.

Moreover, one can find horses in different sizes, colours and shapes. All this depends on their breed and genes. In addition, the quality and quantity they eat daily also impact their health.

Horses are in many colours. There are white, red, brown, black, grey horses and also sometimes they have a mixture of colours. Almost every country in the world has horses. The Arabian horse is popular for running very fast.

Foals are young horses or baby horses. A mother horse gives birth to one foal at a time. About 5000 years ago, horses managed to domesticate humans. A horse lives up to 25 to 30 years. However, it does depend on their living condition.

Horses like living in grassy areas or field where they can eat the grass, leaves and all other types of greenery available. Humans keep horses in a stable which is a building made of wood to keep horses.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

A Beneficial Animal

Humans make use of horses in a lot of ways. One of them is when they travel or ride on their backs. If we look at the past, we see that they came in use in wars. Soldiers used to go on them in battlefields to fight.

In modern times, they have more use in sports because of their great running abilities. They also come in use in games like Horse Riding, Equestrian, Sports Polo and more. On the other hand, in India, people use horses to pull carts and on farms.

After the horse dies, we also use its bones, skin, hair for making carpets, medicine and other leather products. Thus, they come in a lot of use to humans. Horses do not sleep for long, they prefer taking short naps. Moreover, they do not sit. They stand for almost four to fifteen hours.

Due to their physiology, horses are suitable for a lot of works. They also come in use in the entertainment industry. Certain breeds of horses are very beautiful and quiet. They are also kept as pets in farms .

Conclusion of Essay On Horse

To sum it up, a horse is an important part of our ecosystem. We should love and protect them instead of exploiting them for selfish reasons. After all, their existence is important for human survival.

FAQ on Essay On Horse

Question 1: State some fun facts about horses.

Answer 1: Horses start to run shortly after birth. They have around 205 bones in their skeleton. Moreover, horses have bigger eyes than any other mammal living on land.

Question 2: What is the life span of a horse?

Answer 2: The life span of a horse is 25 to 30 years. It basically depends upon their living conditions. Usually, they prefer living in grassy areas or field where they can eat all types of greenery.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

The Curious Symbolism of Horses in Literature and Myth

Horses have been the close and useful companions and servants of humans for many millennia, and over that time they have become associated with a number of symbolic properties. But what is the symbolic significance of the horse in literature and mythology?

Let’s take a closer look at the symbolism of horses down the ages.

Horse symbolism in classical myth

In classical mythology, horses are often depicted pulling chariots of important deities. Because of their speed and strength, horses were the ideal animals to pull the sun across the sky for Phoebus Apollo, although similar chariot-stories surround Mithras in ancient Rome and Elijah in the Old Testament. In the Second Book of Kings, it is said that Elijah was taken up into heaven on a chariot of fire.

Probably the most famous horse in classical myth is Pegasus, the flying horse, offspring of the sea-god Poseidon which he sired with one of the Gorgons. Horses were often associated with the Underworld and, by association, with dark primal forces (including the beastlike energies residing in humans). Pegasus joins this symbolism with divine and skyborne connotations of flight and the heavens. Pegasus represents man’s ability to rise above his base origins and attain creative and imaginative flight. Indeed, the winged horse is often used as a symbol of poetic inspiration. Curiously, the name of Pegasus is close to the word  pege , meaning ‘spring’, and Pegasus is often said to have been born at the Ocean springs. Thus the creature combines water with air: springs and wings both suggest creativity and elevation.

We say the most famous horse in classical mythology is Pegasus, but there is one that is more famous – although it probably wasn’t actually a horse, even a wooden one. We’re talking about the Trojan Horse, the wooden horse of Troy which the Greeks hid inside and drove up to the gates of Troy so they could infiltrate their enemies’ city.

We have discussed the curious story behind the Trojan Horse in more detail here .

The myth of centaurs

Where did the myth of the centaur come from? Centaurs were half-man and half-horse, usually depicted with a horse’s body and a man’s head, arms, and torso. They symbolise lust and the bestial side of man – although it’s worth noting that, in myth, centaurs were both male and female, even if it’s the male ones we tend to hear more about.

Centaurs were often associated with the abduction (or attempted abduction) of local women: for example, it was said they tried to make off with the women who lived in Thessaly in the mountains (the mythical Lapith tribe). Once again, this links to the settled Greeks’ fear of nomadic foreigners arriving on horseback to plunder and ravage their lands.

That said, it was possible in some cases for the human half to tame the wild bestial half of the centaur, and probably the most famous centaur in Greek myth is Chiron, who was known for his wisdom and who tutored both Jason and Achilles. Indeed, after Heracles accidentally struck Chiron with a poison arrow, the immortal centaur chose to give up eternal life and rise into the heavens, where he became the constellation Sagittarius.

Horses in everyday language

Indeed, although since the days of classical Greece people have got used to the sight of a man on a horse, the relationship between horse and rider has continued to inspire fascination and has influenced the language we use. Knights on horseback are known for their chivalry , a word derived from the French for ‘horse’ ( cheval ); it is related to the word cavalry , the collective term for horsemen in battle. But knights didn’t always behave in a chivalrous manner, and sometimes gave people the cavalier treatment: another word ultimately derived from ‘horse’.

The popular boys’ name Philip means ‘lover of horses’, while the word for the hippopotamus comes from the Greek for ‘river-horse’. The part of the brain associated with navigation is known as the hippocampus because its shape is supposed to resemble the sea-horse – and that is what ‘hippocampus’ literally means.

Horses in poetry

In his poem ‘ At Grass ’, Philip Larkin reflects on old racehorses which are ‘put out to grass’. Do memories of the races they won fifteen years ago ‘plague their ears like flies’? Well, these retired racehorses have ‘slipped their names, and stand at ease’.

A number of major twentieth-century poets have written poems called simply ‘The Horses’. Beginning with the Hopkins-esque line ‘I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark’, Ted Hughes’ poem of this name is about Hughes watching a team of horses as light comes to the world at dawn, and reflecting on how different the animals look at such a grey and forbidding time of day.

But perhaps the best-known poem called ‘The Horses’ is the masterly post-nuclear poem of 1956 by the Scottish poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959). Muir tells us about a war that lasted seven days and ‘put the world to sleep’. Barely a year (‘twelvemonth’) later, ‘strange horses’ came. Muir then immediately goes back to the immediate wake of the war, when humans were first confronted with a silence so unnerving and new that even listening to the sound of their own breathing made people afraid.

Then the horses returned. People were scared of the horses at first, because they had turned their backs on the creatures, but eventually they approached them and rediscovered their relationship with them, a relationship based on ‘servitude’ (the horses are, after all, put to work in the fields) but also, more positively, ‘companionship’. The return of the horses signals the ‘beginning’ of a new way of life for the survivors in this post-nuclear landscape.

We have analysed this moving poem in more detail here .

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Type your email…

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

The Horse and His Boy Metaphors and Similes

By c. s. lewis.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by Shirley Marina

Dark Sun Metaphor

Aravis tells that her stepmother hated her and says "the sun appeared dark in her eyes" as long as she was living with them. This is a metaphor for the jealousy and hatred that fills her stepmother and even the sun, a force of life and good, appears to be much darker when reflected inthe eyes of a cruel and hate-filled woman.

Beehive Simile

the Tombs of the Ancient Kings are said to be like great stone beehives. This is due not only to their shape and design but also to the fact that the inside of them is constructed in the fashion of a maze.

Lobster Pot Metaphor

"Easy in but not easily out, as the lobster said in the lobster pot."

this is a metaphor for the fact that it is very difficult to right a wrong decision and that it is much easier to get into something than it is to get out of it. A lobster can get into a pot easily but it is almost impossible for him to get out again and save himself before it is too late.

Steel Simile

Aravis is described as "hard and true as steel" which is a simile for her Constance and her reliability, and also the fact that in times of crisis she is solid.

False Jade Metaphor

Calling someone "false jade" is a testMent to the fact that they seem to have beauty and value on the outside but in reality this is fake and inside they are not beautiful at all. The Metaphor relates to people who are one thing on the outside but another thing entirely within.

Dung Hill Metaphor

The Tisroc states that a costly jewel retains its value even when hidden in a dung hill. This means that strong characteristics such as honor, discretion and trustworthiness are just as valuable in those you do not like, or in this case, in the subjects that he has no respect for, as they are in the most royal or elevated characters. It is the content that is important and not the packaging it comes in.

Update this section!

You can help us out by revising, improving and updating this section.

After you claim a section you’ll have 24 hours to send in a draft. An editor will review the submission and either publish your submission or provide feedback.

The Horse and His Boy Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Horse and His Boy is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

How does the lion direct Shasta and Arvis and both the horses to where they need to go to meet?why do you think Asian forces them together?

What chapter are you referring to?

The Horse and His Boy

The Narnians escape to the garden gate with the help of Aravis. Shasta is supposed to be waiting for them in the tombs.

How does Bree help Shsta develop and grow

Shasta is young man who was kidnapped at birth and sold into Calormene slavery who over the course of the book plans to escape from his abusive master with the help of a talking horse named Bree. It is revealed that Shasta is actually Cor, the...

Study Guide for The Horse and His Boy

The Horse and His Boy study guide contains a biography of C. S. Lewis, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Horse and His Boy
• The Horse and His Boy Summary
• Character List

Wikipedia Entries for The Horse and His Boy

• Introduction

12 Sun, Sunrise & Sunset Metaphors for Writers

The sun is one of the most common contextual features of a setting that we write about. But it’s hard to come up with creative new ways to talk about something that has been discussed in countless books over Millenia. Below, I’ve compiled some creative sun metaphors that can help you break through that writer’s block and find the perfect setting description in your story.

After exploring metaphors for the sun, I’ll also provide some further adjectives and color descriptions that can help add flair to your writing, and create the perfect image in your reader’s mind.

Sun Metaphors and Similes

1. It Slipped through my Fingers

You can picture in your mind sunrays on your hand and, with your fingers outstretched, some of them passing through the gaps in your fingers to lay on the ground below. To say it slipped through your fingers is metaphorical because it didn’t literally slip through anything. It didn’t slide or bounce or refract off your fingers at all. In fact, the it is a long, long way away. Rather, it’s the sunrays that pass between the fingers. But we can be much more creative and visual in our description than to say “the sun rays passed between my fingers” – so we say “it slipped through”.

2. The Blazing Sun Mocked Me

This is an example of personification of the sun. In this metaphor, the sun isn’t a friend but a tormentor. An example of a time when it might mock a protagonist is when they’re out on a hike through the desert. The protagonist is exhausted and dehydrated, with a long way to walk in the heat of the day. Here, we might imagine the protagonist being along and feeling as if the sun is their only company. But the heat means it isn’t a friend but an enemy, mocking you as you try to escape its heat.

Related: A List of Summer Metaphors, Similes and Idioms

3. It Peeked Through the Clouds

We use this metaphor for the moon as well. Imagine the clouds obscuring the sun’s view, but as the clouds part, it seems like it “peeks out” at you to take a look. This is another example of personification. Of course, an object without personality or a brain can’t take a peek at anything. But this personification helps us to create an image in our minds.

This metaphor can be used at the end of a storm to show the end of the storm and the return to better weather.

4. It is a Golden Coin

When I took college classes in creative writing, my professor shared a book he wrote, and it opened with the line: “the sun flipped a golden coin”. I’ve always remembered it and banked this in my mind as a great way to start a story. Others have had their own adaptations of this, such as calling the sun a golden orb or medallion in the sky ( See Also: Sky Metaphors ).

5. The Sun Chased away the Clouds

Here again we have personification. Of course an inanimate object can’t chase anything or anyone! But what is happening here is the description of the changes in the weather as a battle between different elements. The clouds are being chased like a sheepdog chases sheep, to return to its rightful position as the top dog in the skies.

6. It Stood Watch over its Realm / Looked over You

We can imagine the sun being the ruler over us. It sits so far overhead and is visible from just about anywhere you are (so long as you’re outside). It almost feels like it’s watching us constantly, standing guard. Again, this is of course personification – it doesn’t really do any watching at all! If we were to consider it to be like a god , we can imagine it’s watching us and passing judgement on us all day long.

7. It Smiled Upon Me

This one is another more positive, upbeat metaphor. The idea that you are being smiled at from above gives you a sense that you’re blessed and cared for throughout your day. This might be a metaphor you use if you feel as if you’ve had a lucky day or got some good news today. You can’t imagine using this metaphor when you’re going through hardship or feeling the punishing heat of rays on your skin.

8. The Sun’s Yolk

This metaphor calls the sun an egg! It may sound absurd, but if you look at it, it looks like a yolk from the inside of an egg. You might write “the yolk of the sun” as a metaphor to describe it, for example. This is your classic straight-up metaphor where you are directly calling one thing something else.

Sunrise Metaphors and Similes

9. God’s Morning Star

This is a metaphor you might want to use if you’re writing a story from a religious perspective. To wake to “God’s morning star” is to see God in nature – be it a Christian, Muslim or Buddhist God, or even simply a pantheist . It might be seen as a moment to reflect on God, the beauty of the world, or even a moment for quiet prayer before eating.

The character might be waking feeling blessed, or even, feeling as if they’re downtrodden but continue to sustain their faith in their religion.

The sun is quite literally a star , so this is borderline figurative or literal (also depending on you believe in God!).

Related: A List of 19 Light Metaphors

10. The Sunrise Greeted me in the Morning

I love this metaphor. I can imagine someone pulling open the curtains and feeling joyful about their day ahead. When the curtains open, the sun is revealed – shining big and bright right back at the protagonist. The sun is a symbol of the person’s mood and greets or “welcomes” you to a day you’re looking forward. Here, it is being personified, which means you’re giving human features to non-human things.

   Related Sun, Moon, Sky and Stars Articles:

• Red Sky Symbolism
• Sunrise Symbolism
• Sunset Symbolism
• Morning Symbolism
• Harvest Moon Symbolism
• Orange Sky Symbolism
• Sun and Sunrise Sayings
• Morning Star Symbolism
• Symbolism of the Sun
• Night Symbolism
• Darkness Symbolism

Sunset Metaphors and Similes

11. The Sun Succumbed to the Moon

This is a description you might use at the end of the day as night falls. Here, we can imagine the sun and moon taking shifts (there’s another metaphor for you!). They swap each 12 hours, almost like they’re in an unending battle. Here, the sun is the loser, succumbing to the moon (or night), to “retreat” through night.

12. It went to Bed

This is a metaphor to explain the coming of the night. Just as we go to bed, we can also imagine that orb in the sky going to sleep for the night. We shape the patterns of our lives around the night and day, so it makes sense for us to project some of our behaviors back onto the sun itself. This, again, is a form of personification where it’s being given the trait of an animal or human – the idea of going to bed!

Read Also: A List of Nature Idioms and Nature Metaphors

Colors to Describe the Sun

• Yellow – This is probably the most common color that comes to mind. On a clear day in the middle of the day, we’d expect its color to be yellow.
• Amber – This is the color you might expect to see during dusk or early in the morning.
• Copper – We’ll often use “copper” as an adjective in creative descriptions, such as “the scorching copper sun”.
• Honeycomb – This is the color you might experience in a certain ambiance, such as in a forest where the rays slip through the leaves and spot the forest surface with honeycomb colors and patterns.
• Golden – Like Amber, we might use this descriptive color when the atmosphere is thick at dawn or dusk.

Adjectives to Describe the Sun

• Blazing – A term you might use on a particularly hot day.
• Flaming – Similar to blazing – for hot days.
• Glowing – A good term for sunrise or sunset when there is a golden color in the air.
• Shining – A good term for the middle of the day.
• Scorching – Another one for hot days.
• Scolding – Again, this adjective describes the heat of the day.
• Licking – When you can feel rays dancing on your skin.
• Tickling  – Similar to licking.

Sun metaphors can help enhance your writing and make it more descriptive. Aim to create an image in your reader’s mind by using adjectives and colors that match the mood you are trying to set. You can use different metaphors or idioms for different times of day or moods of your protagonists.

Other metaphors you can use in your writing to enrich it include happiness metaphors and fear metaphors.

I’m Chris and I run this website – a resource about symbolism, metaphors, idioms, and a whole lot more! Thanks for dropping by.

Essay on Horse

Students are often asked to write an essay on Horse in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Horse

Introduction.

Horses are large, majestic animals known for their strength and speed. They have played a crucial role in human history, aiding in transportation, farming, and war.

Physical Features

Horses are characterized by their long legs, strong bodies, and flowing manes. Their eyes are on the sides of their heads, allowing them to have a wide field of vision.

Habitat and Diet

Horses are found worldwide and can adapt to various climates. They are herbivores, primarily eating grasses, but also enjoy fruits and vegetables.

Horses are social animals, often living in herds. They communicate through body language and sounds.

Importance to Humans

Horses have been invaluable to humans, from providing transportation to companionship. They continue to be loved and respected by people today.

Also check:

• 10 Lines on Horse
• Paragraph on Horse

250 Words Essay on Horse

The horse, a majestic and versatile creature, has been a significant player in the narrative of human civilization. Their strength, speed, and endurance have been harnessed by humans for various purposes, ranging from transportation to warfare, from agriculture to sports.

Evolution and Diversity

Horses evolved over 50 million years from small multi-toed creatures to the large, single-toed animals we know today. The Equus genus, including all modern horses, zebras, and donkeys, emerged around 4 million years ago. Horses are not a monolithic species but are incredibly diverse, with over 300 distinct breeds.

Symbolism and Cultural Significance

Horses have long been symbols of freedom, power, beauty, grace, strength, and speed in various cultures. They have been depicted in art, literature, mythology, and religion, often symbolizing heroism, nobility, or divine power.

Economic and Social Impact

Historically, horses were essential for transportation, warfare, and agriculture. The advent of industrialization reduced their role in these areas, but they remain significant in sports, recreation, and therapy. The horse industry contributes billions to the global economy, providing jobs and recreational opportunities.

Conservation and Welfare

Despite their historical and cultural importance, horses face various challenges, including habitat loss, inhumane treatment, and disease. Efforts to ensure their welfare and conserve endangered breeds are crucial to preserving this remarkable species for future generations.

In conclusion, the horse is more than just an animal. It is a symbol of our shared history, a testament to our ingenuity, and a reminder of our responsibility to protect and respect all life forms.

500 Words Essay on Horse

The history and significance of horses.

Horses, a symbol of freedom and power, have played a pivotal role in human civilization. Their domestication, dating back to 4000 BC, marked a significant turning point in history, enabling advancements in agriculture, warfare, and transportation.

Horse Anatomy and Breeds

Horses possess a unique anatomy that allows them to be both powerful and agile. They have a well-developed sense of balance and a strong fight-or-flight response, making them excellent escape artists in the wild. There are over 350 breeds of horses, each with unique characteristics and uses. For instance, Thoroughbreds are known for their speed and spirit, making them perfect for racing, while Clydesdales, with their immense strength, are often used for heavy labor.

The Role of Horses in Human Society

The relationship between humans and horses is a complex one, marked by both exploitation and mutual benefit. Initially, horses were used for food and milk. Later, their role shifted towards transportation, agriculture, and warfare. The horse’s speed and endurance made it an invaluable asset in battle, and its strength was harnessed for farming and transportation. In modern times, horses have found a place in sports, recreational activities, and therapeutic programs.

Horses in Art and Culture

Horses have been a popular subject in art and culture, symbolizing various attributes such as power, grace, nobility, and freedom. They have been depicted in various forms of art, from prehistoric cave paintings to contemporary digital art. In literature, horses often serve as symbols of heroism and are used to represent the journey of the protagonist.

Conservation and Ethical Concerns

Despite their historical significance and cultural value, horses face numerous threats today. Habitat loss, overbreeding, and inhumane treatment are some of the main issues. It is crucial to promote ethical treatment and conservation of horses, not just for their sake, but for the preservation of our shared history and culture.

Horses have been an integral part of human civilization, contributing significantly to our development and culture. Their strength, endurance, and grace have not only made them valuable assets but have also inspired art, literature, and symbolism. As we move forward, it is essential to ensure their protection and ethical treatment, acknowledging the profound role they have played in shaping our world.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Domestic Animals
• Essay on Stray Animals
• Essay on Importance of Animals

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• Ask LitCharts AI
• Discussion Question Generator
• Essay Prompt Generator
• Quiz Question Generator

• Literature Guides
• Poetry Guides
• Shakespeare Translations
• Literary Terms

The Horses Summary & Analysis by Ted Hughes

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

"The Horses," by British poet Ted Hughes, describes the stillness and serenity of the natural world at dawn. The poem's speaker, likely representing Hughes himself, describes walking through the woods on a quiet, chilly morning. The speaker comes across a group of sleeping horses who are as still and silent as the surrounding landscape, appearing like magnificent gray statues in the darkness. When the sun rises and burns away the morning mists, the horses remain motionless, as though in no rush to heed this wake-up call. The speaker is moved by their patience and hopes to remember the peace and beauty of this isolated landscape upon returning to the noisy chaos of city life. Hughes published "The Horses" in his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain , in 1957.

• Read the full text of “The Horses”

The Full Text of “The Horses”

“the horses” summary, “the horses” themes.

The Stability and Beauty of Nature

Rural Silence vs. Urban Noise

• Lines 27-38

Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Horses”

I climbed through ... ... cast in frost.

I came out ... ... the sky ahead.

And I saw ... ... grey silent world.

Lines 16-18

I listened in ... ... from the darkness.

Lines 18-26

Then the sun ... ... to the horses.

Lines 27-34

There, still they ... ... red levelling rays—

Lines 35-38

In din of ... ... the horizons endure.

“The Horses” Symbols

• Lines 8-15: “And I saw the horses: / Huge in the dense grey—ten together— / Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move, / With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves, / Making no sound. / I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head. / Grey silent fragments / Of a grey silent world.”
• Lines 26-38: “And came to the horses. /                                                     There, still they stood, / But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light, / Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves / Stirring under a thaw while all around them / The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound. / Not one snorted or stamped, / Their hung heads patient as the horizons, / High over valleys in the red levelling rays— / In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces, / May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place / Between the streams and red clouds, hearing the curlews, / Hearing the horizons endure.”

“The Horses” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Line 4: “A world cast in frost.”
• Line 5: “tortuous statues in the iron light”
• Line 6: “the valleys were draining the darkness”
• Line 10: “Megalith-still.”
• Lines 14-15: “Grey silent fragments / Of a grey silent world.”
• Line 17: “The curlew's tear turned its edge on the silence.”
• Line 18: “Slowly detail leafed from the darkness.”
• Line 29: “draped stone manes”
• Line 31: “The frost showed its fires”
• Lines 33-34: “Their hung heads patient as the horizons, / High over valleys in the red levelling rays—”
• Lines 37-38: “Between the streams and red clouds, hearing the curlews, / Hearing the horizons endure.”
• Line 5: “tortuous statues in the iron light.”
• Lines 6-8: “But the valleys were draining the darkness / Till the moorline—blackening dregs of the brightening grey— / Halved the sky ahead.”
• Lines 9-10: “Huge in the dense grey—ten together— / Megalith-still.”
• Lines 18-22: “Then the sun / Orange, red, red erupted / Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud, / Shook the gulf open, showed blue, / And the big planets hanging—.”
• Lines 28-31: “But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light, / Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves / Stirring under a thaw while all around them / The frost showed its fires.”

Alliteration

• Line 1: “dawn dark”
• Line 4: “cast,” “came”
• Line 6: “draining,” “darkness”
• Line 7: “blackening,” “brightening”
• Line 8: “horses”
• Line 9: “Huge,” “ten together”
• Line 10: “Megalith,” “making,” “move”
• Line 11: “manes,” “hind-hooves”
• Line 17: “tear turned”
• Line 18: “detail,” “darkness”
• Line 20: “Silently,” “splitting”
• Line 21: “Shook,” “showed”
• Line 24: “dream, down”
• Line 25: “dark”
• Line 27: “There,” “still,” “they,” “stood”
• Line 28: “steaming”
• Line 29: “stone,” “hind-hooves”
• Line 30: “Stirring”
• Line 31: “frost,” “fires,” “still,” “sound”
• Line 32: “snorted,” “stamped”
• Line 33: “hung heads”
• Line 34: “red,” “rays”
• Line 36: “May,” “meet my memory”
• Line 37: “clouds,” “curlews”
• Line 38: “Hearing,” “horizons”
• Line 3: “Not a leaf, not a bird—”
• Line 10: “making no move,”
• Line 11: “With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,”
• Line 12: “Making no sound.”
• Line 13: “not one snorted”
• Line 19: “Orange, red, red erupted”
• Line 29: “Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves”
• Lines 31-32: “But still they made no sound. / Not one snorted or stamped,”
• Lines 37-38: “hearing the curlews, / Hearing the horizons endure.”
• Lines 4-5: “wood / Where”
• Lines 6-7: “darkness / Till”
• Lines 14-15: “fragments / Of”
• Lines 18-19: “sun / Orange”
• Lines 19-20: “erupted / Silently”
• Lines 23-24: “turned / Stumbling”
• Lines 24-25: “towards / The”
• Lines 29-30: “hind-hooves / Stirring”
• Lines 30-31: “them / The”
• Lines 36-37: “place / Between”

“The Horses” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Frost-making
• Hind-hooves
• (Location in poem: Line 2: “Evil air, a frost-making stillness,”)

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Horses”

Rhyme scheme, “the horses” speaker, “the horses” setting, literary and historical context of “the horses”, more “the horses” resources, external resources.

The Poem Out Loud — Listen to a reading of "The Horses."

Who Was Ted Hughes? — A short biography from the Academy of American Poets.

The Hawk in the Rain — A short discussion of Hughes's first book, in which "The Horses" appeared, by scholar Heather Clark.

Ted Hughes at Cambridge — A video exploring Hughes's connection to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied myths and legends as a student.

Poets in Love: Hughes and Sylvia Plath — Frieda Hughes discusses the love, complicated relationship, and poetic legacy of her parents, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. 

LitCharts on Other Poems by Ted Hughes

Anniversary

A Picture of Otto

Bayonet Charge

Cat and Mouse

Football at Slack

Fulbright Scholars

Full Moon and Little Frieda

Hawk Roosting

Telegraph Wires

The Harvest Moon

The Thought Fox

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

• Quizzes, saving guides, requests, plus so much more.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Michelle Goldberg

Matt Gaetz Is the Perfect Man for the Job

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

The expression “The worse, the better” is often attributed to Vladimir Lenin, and captures a sort of messianic nihilism — the dream that escalating misery will hasten the fall of a corrupt order. Usually, I find this ethos despicable; in my experience, suffering only begets more suffering. I’m making an exception, however, for Donald Trump’s nomination of the former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, a flagrant provocation that is, like a pulpy B movie, so bad it’s good.

While Trump’s choice of Gaetz to lead the Justice Department is a clear sign that his second administration will be catastrophically chaotic, vengeful and corrupt, that should never have been in doubt. Trump made no secret during his campaign of his desire to persecute his political enemies. Anyone he chose as attorney general would share his interest in turning the justice system into the enforcement arm of the MAGA movement. The selection of Gaetz just rips the mask off. With it, Trump is trolling not just his defeated opponents but many of his craven establishment supporters. It’s like Caligula trying to make his horse a consul.

Of all the people Trump was considering for A.G., Gaetz is unique mainly for how much he is hated by other Republicans, and not just moderate ones. In the final months of the last Trump administration, the Justice Department opened an investigation into whether Gaetz had a relationship with an underage girl that violated federal sex trafficking laws. Though that inquiry was closed without charges, the House opened an ethics investigation into him. It was reportedly set to vote on releasing a damning report on Friday, which Gaetz may have tried to pre-empt by resigning, though it could still become public.

When Gaetz was accused of sleeping with the girl, “there’s a reason why no one in the conference came and defended him,” Markwayne Mullin, a very conservative Republican senator from Oklahoma, told CNN last year. His colleagues, said Mullin, had seen videos “of the girls that he had slept with,” which Gaetz allegedly showed off on the House floor. After Gaetz forced Kevin McCarthy out as House speaker, throwing his party into disorder, Mike Rogers, a Republican congressman from Alabama, seemed ready to physically attack him and had to be restrained by colleagues.

It should go without saying that Gaetz is not, by any normal standards, even a tiny bit qualified to be attorney general. He practiced law for only about two years before running for office, handling small-time civil matters, like suing an old woman for money she owed his father’s caregiving company.

His chief credential is not his mastery of the law but his contempt for it. “We’re proud of the work we did on Jan. 6 to make legitimate arguments about election integrity,” he told Steve Bannon in 2022. He’s called for abolishing both the F.B.I. and the Justice Department unless they “come to heel.” If confirmed, he will be single-minded in his devotion to carrying out Trump’s will without concern for legal niceties.

Gaetz is not the only Trump nominee who seems to have been chosen precisely for his hostility to the values of the organization he’s supposed to lead. On Thursday, Trump announced plans to make Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s leading anti-vaxxer, secretary of health and human services. Pete Hegseth, the Fox News weekend host whom Trump wants to put atop the Pentagon — an institution that is supposed to be scrupulously apolitical — wrote a book describing “social justice saboteurs” as more dangerous to America than any external enemy. During his first administration, when Trump sought to turn the military against left-wing protesters, his defense officials thwarted him. Hegseth, who accused “progressive storm troopers” of turning our cities into “little Samaras,” a reference to an Iraqi city besieged by ISIS, would almost certainly have fewer qualms.

“It’s the enemy from within,” Trump said of his opponents at a rally last month. “All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country. That’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.” Some of his supporters thrilled to this language, but others convinced themselves that he didn’t really mean it. By tapping Gaetz to be the highest law enforcement official in the land, Trump has done us the favor of stripping away whatever plausible deniability remained about his intentions. It’s a show of dominance directed more at Republicans than Democrats, meant to make them abase themselves by acquiescing to a nomination they know is indefensible.

Some social conservatives are aghast: The Christian legal group Liberty Counsel put out a press releasing describing the choice of Gaetz as “shocking and disappointing,” and Ben Domenech, a co-founder of the right-wing website The Federalist, called him “absolutely vile,” among other insults I can’t repeat here. If Gaetz makes it all the way to the confirmation hearings, the proceedings will be a popcorn-worthy carnival of scandal and backbiting. Having won the presidency and both houses of Congress, Trump could have launched his new administration in an atmosphere of confident Republican unity. Instead, it will commence with the crisis, degradation and melodrama that is his natural habitat.

In the end, I’d expect almost all Republican senators to fall in line and humiliate themselves by voting for Gaetz. “I completely trust President Trump’s decision making on this one,” Mullin said on CNN on Wednesday, though he added that Gaetz would need to sell himself to the Senate. Even if a small number of senators find the fortitude to reject such a preposterous candidate, Trump may attempt to go around them by employing a never-used constitutional provision to force the Senate into recess so he can make appointments without its consent.

And if that doesn’t work, whoever Trump chooses instead of Gaetz will almost certainly be just as destructive, if less flamboyant in his immorality and lust for attention. Trump picked Gaetz, after all, because he’s an excellent representative of the MAGA movement.

Once Trump won, decent outcomes for the country were probably off the table. The institutions are unlikely to hold. Establishment Republicans cannot be counted on to protect us. The best we can hope for is that our new rulers will be stymied by incompetence, infighting and self-sabotage. In that respect, Gaetz may be just the man for the job.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.