Sam Reads Poetry

Watering the Horse

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
The white flake of snow
That has just fallen on the horses mane! 

Robert Bly

Why I like it:

What can I say about this poem? It feels like rest. Such a simple poem, but with the depth of haiku for feeling and meaning. 

I love to travel. Walking, backpacking, driving, flying – just about anything will do the trick for me. I think there’s something about moving my body that seems to align it with the movement of my mind, which is almost never as still as the body. I can’t think of just one instance because there are so many, but I know viscerally the feeling of external movement coming into sync with internal thoughts and feelings, and there being a moment of stasis between my mind and the world. I think of sitting in the window seat on a plane and feeling like I could look at the clouds forever and not get bored, or backpacking and feeling, despite the trail being flat and straight, that I’m kind of sinking down between the trees and undergrowth on either side of me as I walk. It feels like melting.

For me this poem illustrates that feeling of stasis beautifully. Of course, in the poem, there is actually a moment of stasis on the rider’s journey. The horse is watering. The rider sits thinking of giving up ambition. And in this point of stillness, like the moment where a ball stops in midair before it starts falling again, a snowflake appears.

The effect is so vast – I feel the change in the weather that this snowflake indicates; I feel the inflection in the rider’s movement as he now weighs the journey he’s taken against the potentially snowy journey that lies ahead; and perhaps most of all I feel the fragility of the snowflake itself (yes, I am one), and in that moment I seem to feel the life of a snowflake and how precious its moment of being a crystal and being beautiful is before it melts into the horses mane. I feel the rider melting a little into the horses mane in that moment too as he flirts with the idea of giving up ambition.

I think this makes a wonderful mid-life poem. I imagine that Bly might have been thinking of where he’s been and how far he has to go when this poem was written. But there’s no dread in it. There is a little of that tragic feeling of something beautiful coming to an end, but the exclamation points and the clear eyes of the poet give this poem a feeling of excitement in this point of inflection.

It would have been easy to mourn the second half of things in that snowflake moment, but instead, the poet seems to celebrate them!

A note on form:

Watering the Horse

 –        /            –   /        –    /   –     /    /  –    /  –
How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
/     –    /   – /     –     /        –        / 
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
–      /        /        –  / 
The white flake of snow
–       –      /      /     –   –   –   /    –    / 
That has just fallen on the horse’s mane! 

This poem is almost haiku. Haiku is a Japanese form characterized by 3 lines with 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively, a turn, generally at the end of the second line, that often communicates a sudden change in perspective, and a reference to the time of year (kigo). Each line often stands as a sensory unit. Thematically, haiku often deals with impermanence. 

“Watering the Horse” obviously draws from several of these conventions. The season, likely late autumn, is implied by the single flake of snow, which in the context of this poem feels more like a first flake than a last flake to me. The poet’s technique of resting the immensity of a change of season and a change of heart on a soon-to-melt flake of snow is also true of the transitory spirit of haiku, and it’s hallmark big-in-the-small-ness.

The poem scans best in accentual, rather than syllabic meter, but the spondees (two adjacent stressed syllables)  in lines 1, 3 and 4 invite a little of that syllabic, Japanese flavor. There also seems to be a distinct loss of balance or regularity in the last two compared to the first two lines. That is, the meter goes from being fairly iambic (one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable) to a mixed, lilting meter, beginning with “white flake”, that gives last lines of the poem a delicate feeling.

I notice also that the turning point in the poem, when the theme is redirected from a kind of spiritual acquiescence to the life of a snowflake, is handled with such phonetic delicacy. The consonant sounds become very soft (th, wh, fl, sn, w), with one crisp k sound that, I think, gives the crystal structure of a snowflake a place to be sharp in the sound of this line, amidst all that softness.