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The Rain Horse
The Rain Horse
Hughes in Man/Nature clash. Man is not “recognised” by nature and has become an outsider.
Nature is personified and given strong emotional attributes. Horse is powerful, male, aggressive,
free. Man is muddy and weak until he rediscovers the aggression of an earlier, savage age. Drives
off horse and reaches safety though he is aware of his weakness.
Tasks:
1. Man, collar up in driving rain on hillside. Nature is dominant and man is not significant here
– bored and frustrated.
2. First view of “thin, black horse”. Use the similes of ill-omen.
3. Man finds shelter through “barricade of brambles” and the ground sucking at his feet.
4. Second view of Horse -“watching him”.
5. Horse attack – detail in description.
6. Horse: “tall as a statue” watching him. NB his state of mind.
7. Horse attack with onomatopoeia.
8. Finds stones as weapons. Note comparison with eggs.
9. Horse attack 3, man fights back. Note PF in passage.
10. Horse attack and hit with stones under “superior guidance”
11. Horse cat-like pain response –domesticity. Man becomes dominant again
12. Closing image – man in barn. Ashamed and in pain. Other images?
Literary devices:
1. Pathetic fallacy: Uses rain as a sign of the hostility of nature. Other images that arise here
are the “barricade” of thorns and the fact that the ground seems to deliberately impede his
running. Note the sky is at its darkest for the final attack and defence. The rain will attack
him –“plastering beat … on his bare skull” and nature will be personified to cause him pain –
“whipped by oak twigs”. Ending under cover of roof suggests that man can tame nature but
not subdue it.
2. Specific language chosen for effect throughout:
3. Personification is used throughout the story to give human attributes to the horse and to
nature. The horse can decide to watch the man as though thinking about the plan of attack.
More clearly, nature is personified as a violent attacker – “this land no longer recognised
him”, “the ankle deep clay dragged at him”.
4. Free Indirect Speech is used on 274.6 as the rhetorical questions suggest the man’s own
thoughts.
5. The overall diction is highly poetic. Onomatopoeia is common (“spattering whack”) as is
alliteration: “Like Lightening his Legs…” The use of compound adjectives and violent lexis all
help to deliver a highly aggressive and virile story.
6. Variation of sentence length. Short sentences are used to state fact in a powerful manner
and at times to suggest the FIS of the protagonist.
Story: A man is pursued by a horse during a rain storm. He throws stones at it and drives it off
before he finds shelter at a farm. As a bare outline it seems so easy. The violence of the language
and the vivid depiction of the natural elements, as opposed to the human who was once a part of
nature but who after 12 years is now merely bored, suggests a central theme. Mankind has lost
touch with nature and needs to return to a state of semi savagery in order to reclaim the ascendancy
over it. Sadly, this ascendancy must result in the hurting of nature. At the end of the story there is
no triumph, rather the man is left dejected “as if some important part has been cut out of his brain”.
This is deliberately ambiguous. He may be recognising his place in nature and mourning the loss of
the ability to respond to nature or he may be returning to the de-sensitized being that started the
story. Nature imagery abounds and nature is certainly cruel – even the stones are likened to goose
eggs and therefore carry a weight because of this image. Eggs symbolise fertility and fragility of life.
Here they are weapons.