The Symbolism of the Horse in ‘horse’

In ‘horse,’ the speaker describes a horse being betrayed and then killed in a small town in Texas. The first two stanzas described the horse thundering towards outstretched hands being attracted to a field of corn but instead it is attacked by a group of white teenage boys who leave it mutilated. The sheriff of the town does not do anything because he believes that it is in their nature to do so. In the last stanzas the Mexican owner puts the horse out of his misery and someone tries to pay him for the damage. His people are disappointed because they believe that money could not make up for the death of the horse but, they do nothing about it. It would seem the horse in the poem is meant to represent the Mexican culture and how it is being eradicated by the dominant white society in the United States.

Although titles are commonly capitalized, the title in this poem is not. This tells us that she purposely did not capitalize the name for a reason. Proper nouns are usually capitalized but generally the word horse is a generic noun. Generic nouns are always written in lower case because there are a variety of species within that category of noun. This implies that she wanted the horse to be a variety of meanings. The horse could easily represent the many kinds of Mexicans living in the United States. One being the fair few who stick to the culture they had since birth in Mexico. In the fourth stanza it says, “the Chicanos shake their heads / turn away some rich father … as if green could staunch red” (28-32). This describes the people who are still true to their Mexican culture and believe what has happened is shameful. The other kinds are the Mexicans who have given in to the dominant society in America because they think it is fin...

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...en they do not accept our culture.

A shift in the poem begins in the last stanza of the poem. It begins in line 43 and runs all the way until the end. The tone of the poem changes and instead of the ‘great’ or ‘black’ horse graciously running through the fields we hear before, we are introduced into the ‘dead’ horse, “hooves iron-shod hurling lightning” (45). It is telling us that the horse is obviously angered now. The stanza before it described the mexicanos that just lowered their heads and did nothing about it which possibly would have been the motive for the change in the poem. Since the horse represents Mexican culture, it shows how their culture has changed and developed into something completely different. After that moment, they were forever changed and obviously Gloria thought it was for the worst.

Works Cited

Anzaldua, Gloria. “horse.” 1987. Print.