Andy Brown
In three intense months during the first Covid lockdown, 2020, my wife Natasha taught me to ride her horses, one of whom is descended from the bloodline of the racehorse, Shergar. We live in rural Devon, and ‘exercising your horse daily’ was one of the very privileged things we were permitted to do while so many others were suffering terrible hardships; a privilege which has changed my life and outlook. Natasha has been riding for 40 years, and it’s safe to say horses are her life. At the time I was learning, I was also re-reading The Iliad, having acquired a handsome 18th Century edition of Pope’s translation from my mother, to add to my other copies of modern translations by Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald. As a novice rider, I noticed just how many horses feature in Homer’s celebrated similes and other scenes in the narrative, such as the chariot race in the triumphal games. Natasha would soon be turning 50, and I wanted to write a long poem to mark that occasion and to thank her for transforming my life through horses. I decided to collect the horse scenes and similes from Homer’s text (cited in the margins of my poem as ‘Book x’ etc.), and to re-write them in the context of my own new riding life. Homer’s well-known epithets (e.g. ‘of the silver bow’) are here rendered as horse riding dedications. I do not have any Greek, so my versions are based upon Fitzgerald’s translation of The Iliad.
Horse Suite
HORSE SUITE
Equine fragments adapted from Homer’s Iliad,
for my wife, Natasha, on her 50th birthday
i.
and there the thoughtful horses stood entranced Book xvii
as resolute as tombstones, or marble
monuments, their tangled manes hanging low,
their languid heads held out to nets of hay.
We stood and breathed their stable scent
of day-old dung and wetted straw, breathed in
the perfume of their bales, their vast spirit
ii.
and then the unleashed mare broke from the yard Book xv
answering some inner voice or instinct
to fly across the fields and bathe her blood
down by the ford, her mane flung to the sun.
Suddenly, by scent, or some faint whinny,
she sensed the sister herd she’d left behind
and sprang back up the lane towards her field
iii.
you led the horses down the forest trail Book xv
to Buckland in the Moor, through Ausewell Woods,
sure in your art, your own horse fast ahead,
the pony on her lead rope, nose to tail.
You led them so easily, you could have leaped
from one horse to the other at a gallop,
Natasha of the shining hair, racer of wind
iv.
mount and you’ll find out how fast this filly Book v
bred from the bloodline of Shergar can run:
she knows the land and how to wheel upon it
in pursuit of flight, like wind veering.
When she knows the rider, she can cover
as much ground as the eye can travel from
a tor, over wine dark trees, in one bound
v.
mount, and let me mind the other horses…
god forbid they panic, missing your voice,
to snap a tether twine and canter down Book vi
the field, kicking up their fine limbs and hooves –
heads high one moment and bucked low the next,
crazying the pasture, manic on grass,
filling the field with brays and nickering
vi.
and then you speak to your team: Lou-Lou, Maggie, Book viii
Grace. Now’s the time to pay for all that feed:
the wetted beet, the chaff, the bales of hay,
those meadow herbs mixed in to calm your nerves.
The horses listen at their restocked troughs, Book ix
champ the sweet hay near their stable beds
and wait for the sun to ascend her stairs
vii.
you adorn yourself in your panoply Book viii
Natasha of the knee-high riding boots –
then mount, taking up your whip, squeezing
the horse onwards. She runs at full stretch –
midway between the ground and the sky,
mother of wild things, tempering the air –
your jacket billowing, your mane blown gold
viii.
Natasha of the diamante hat, Book ix
adept in directing the wild-fire of horses,
attending to your charges, their heads nodding
in plaited forelocks of gold and of bay.
You speak to the mares with a tap of your crop
and they move of themselves through the posterns,
tail tips whisking each other’s soft muzzles
ix.
three mares: a Dartmoor-Arab cross, a cob Book x
an Irish sports horse from a racing line,
who by their will and legs confer such joy,
a woman who kept them would want for nothing.
A woman may ride such field-tousled mounts,
but life can’t be repeated once it’s done –
the riding always happens here and now
x.
and willingly they run with foaming chests Book xx/xxiii
and dust coating their bellies, to bear us
out of the forest and onto the moor
loved by the breeze… who, in their galloping
over farmland, run without trampling the wheat,
as dust rises beneath their barrel’d trunks
in whirlwind clouds, their manes sketching slipstreams
xi.
over the plain they cover distance quickly, Book xxiii
going through their paces, the woods left behind.
Running on the river’s back they clip
white foam from the rills of tumbling water.
O master of horse, tamer of ponies,
who taught me every kind of horsemanship,
holding your form at full stretch on the moor Book xxii
xii.
come then, take the bright reins and the crop Book xix
Natasha of the bridle and the nose band.
Place the bit between the teeth, cinch the girth
and drive your small team of trim-hooved horses,
giving them loose reins into the home stretch,
making turns with a sure hand before Book xxiv
the immortal horses bear you away