Names of Horses by Donald Hall

First published: 1978, in Kicking the Leaves

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

Donald Hall’s “Names of Horses” consists of twenty-nine lines of unrhymed free verse, arranged in seven brief stanzas and a final single line. The speaker, who directly addresses the horses and finally provides their names, is clearly Hall himself; the farm on which these horses have worked is called Eagle Pond, and the poem itself is thematically related to essays collected in String Too Short to Be Saved (1961). A good deal of Hall’s work, both poetry and prose, has focused on that farm in New Hampshire, home for three generations of his ancestors and a retreat for Hall himself.

In the first half of the poem, Hall addresses what seems to be a single horse, praising it for the work it performs season by season. This, readers quickly learn, is not a pet but a draft horse, engaged in crucial activities on an old-fashioned farm. The jobs include hauling firewood, cut this winter for the next; pulling cartloads of manure to spread on the fields; mowing and raking the grass and hauling it to the barn; and pulling the family buggy to church each Sunday.

At about the midpoint of the poem, a shift occurs, and the reader realizes that the single horse is in fact a series of horses, “Generation on generation” taking turns at the work, living and dying on the farm, each horse in turn being put down and buried by “the man, who fed you and kept you.” Death comes only when each horse in succession becomes “old and lame,” in such constant pain it is unable to graze comfortably.

Over the years, the place where the horses are buried becomes “the pasture of dead horses.” Here are the remains of the “old toilers, soil makers,” who are finally in the last line addressed by name.

Forms and Devices

“Names of Horses” is quite modern in its rejection of traditional rhyme and metrical patterns, but Hall is nonetheless a careful craftsman who makes every word and sound, the design of each line, and the order of lines and paragraphs contribute to the total impact the poem has on the reader.

The words the poet chooses are concrete and specific. Many of the nouns designate tools and other items that characterize farm life in the days before heavy machinery powered by diesel or gasoline engines replaced horse power, such as sledges, hames, and, most picturesquely, the “leather quartertop buggy.” Many of the verbs serve to emphasize the difficulty of the horse’s work: “strained,” “haul,” “culled,” “dragged.”

Hall uses a long line in “Names of Horses,” rather like Walt Whitman’s. Most of the lines are enjambed; that is, the sense of the sentence is carried across the line break. When a line is end-stopped, usually at the end of the paragraph, the last word or phrase conveys a vivid image or a significant idea: “as the sea smooths glass” or “shuddering in your skin,” for example. A kind of rhythm is frequently supplied within these lines by alliteration, which can make the verse slower and heavier, as in “dragged the wagon,” or quicker and lighter, as in “trotted the two miles to church” with a “light load.”

The overall arrangement of the poem is seasonal. The first paragraph, four strong lines, begins “All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars” and recounts what is evidently the hardest work the horse does all year: hauling wood to heat the house and to fuel “the simmering range.”

“In April,” one month that stands for spring, the horse both produces and spreads manure. The work seems lighter. The season of summer takes up six lines and parts of two paragraphs, as well as the most elaborate imagery in the poem. Here the focus is on hay-making and on old-fashioned technology. One hears the “clacketing” of the mowing machine, feels the summer heat, and watches the intricate movement from field to stack to barn and back for another load. These lines—with their internal rhymes of “stack,” “rack,” and “back”; “drag” and “wagon”; and “hay” and “day”—provide a thematic and musical high point for the poem. Hay-making is as important an activity for Hall as it was for Robert Frost. For both New England poets, it epitomizes the natural life rhythms of the traditional farm.

The next paragraph briefly interrupts this seasonal pattern. The first two lines describe the Sunday trip to church and the horse’s opportunity to graze “in the sound of hymns,” the horse’s lightest work in its happiest circumstances. The phrase “Generation on generation” carries forward the worshipful tone established by the hymns. This passage ends with the attractive image of the horse gazing out the window of its stall.

The next two paragraphs deal with the fall, the last season of the farm year. Horses live for many years, but, come “one October,” each horse in succession is taken out to the appropriate “sandy ground above Eagle Pond” and shot. The event is described in detail, from the digging of the hole to the filling of the grave after the horse is “felled” into it—hard work for the farmer, who for once does not have the help of his horse.

The last paragraph focuses on the pasture where the generations of horses are buried. Readers learn that the life cycle of the draft horse has been going on for 150 years at Eagle Pond. Because pine trees are taking root, one can surmise that this ground is no longer being grazed; the cycle has ended. Hall addresses the horses with a pair of powerful epithets (with a haunting internal rhyme) “old toilers, soil makers” and, finally, in the formal apostrophe of the last line, calls them by name.