At grass
...e the horse ran two-dozen races, there will be fables, or legendary stories about it, which implies that the horse won a lot of races. In the third stanza, the poet speaker uses a lot of imagery to show the reader the horse’s racing days. The speaker uses the words “silks”, “parasols”, and “heat”. All of these words relate to each other in the sense that they all have connotations of brightness. The silks are the shiny garments that a jockey might wear during a race. The words “parasols” and “heat” relate to each other because a parasol is an umbrella that is used to shield the sun. When one thinks of the word “heat”, the bright imagery of the sun probably comes to mind. The final two stanzas of this poem are about the horse’s life after it retires from racing. The speaker wonders whether or not the horse is affected by the memories it has of its racing days. The speaker asks, “Do memories plague their ears like flies?” (19). In asking this, the speaker is asking whether or not the horse’s memories of racing will make the horse ever want to race again. The speaker says that the horse just “shakes [its] head” (20). This may be the horse’s reply to the speaker’s question of whether or not the horse feels the desire to race again. The lines “Summer by summer all stole away, / The starting-gates, the crowds and cries” show the over time, each summer, the horse might have lost the adrenaline that it once had (21-22). It longer desires the feeling of being in the starting gate at the beginning of the race; and it does not crave the excitement of having a crowd cheering during the race. In the final stanza, the speaker is also trying to say that even though the horse is “anonymous” it still is content with its life. The speaker says that the horse “[Has] slipped [its] name, and stands at ease” (25). By saying this, the speaker is saying that the horse no longer goes by the “almanacked” name that it once had, but even so, it is still satisfied with the life it has. The speaker refers to how the horses “gallop for what must be joy” (26). In saying this, it shows that the horse is galloping because it wants to gallop, and not because it wants to be famous. Perhaps the speaker i...