This is an essay that I made with Flor Araya
TASK:
Explore past memories in “Horses” and “Pike”.
Even though the poems ‘Pike’ and ‘Horses’ are written by two different writers, they both deal with past memories of the authors.
On the one hand, in “Horses”, Edwin Muir tries to remember his childhood. How, when he was little, he lived on a farm but then, during the industrial revolution, he had to move to an industrial city, which was very traumatic for him. He depicts how on his farm, he used to think that horses were “ecstatic monsters”. “(…) with steaming nostrils home, they came, they seemed gigantic in the gloam, (…) glowing with mysterious fire (…)” In this stanza, the author describes how, as a child he was afraid of horses, he compares them to dragons as he thinks of horses as fearful and powerful creatures just like dragons. Nevertheless, in the last stanza, he talks about them with positive and nice adjectives as he’s an adult, a grown-up. As he’s melancholic and misses his childhood. “Ah, now it fades! It fades!” In this stanza the author wants to describe how he’s in pain because the memories are ‘fading’, disappearing, starting to get ‘blurry’. He’s nostalgic of living in the farm, of watching the horses and of horses being used for work and wars and not just for fun. He admires and misses the horses now that he’s older.
On the other hand, in “Pike” Ted Hughes depicts a memory from his childhood where he’s fishing in a pond and he sees the pike. He describes it as flawless. “Pike three inches long perfect” he thinks of the pike as a perfect creature, with perfect colours, perfect movements; “They dance on the surface…”, this quote gives the reader a reference of how the fish moves, very elegantly. Nevertheless, Ted also explains how he is scared of this fish, he describes it as “malevolent” animals. “Killers from the egg” meaning that the pike was meant to kill even before it was born. He is afraid because he realizes that he is disturbing the pike in his habitat. That men take animals away from their natural habitat and place them in captivity. “Three we kept behind glass”, conveying that they took the fish and put it in a fish bowl (in an “unnatural habitat”).
In conclusion, both poems, “Pike” and “Horses”, deal with the author’s past memories.