Before the flies grow too loud, a child slips close to a fence and watches a horse until the animal opens its eyes. Elizabeth Madox Roberts, born in Perryville, Kentucky, in 1881, wrote “Horse” among the poems in her 1922 collection “Under the Tree.” Roberts grew up surrounded by rural Kentucky life, and her work often returns to farm textures—sunlight, leaves, animals, plain objects—without turning them into decorations. The piece is part observation, part daydream, and part quiet defense of a creature’s right to be seen.
The opening scene is built from small visual details. A bridle hangs around a post, sunlight and leaves scatter spots on the ground, and the speaker peers through a fence at a brown horse beside a drab post. The color words “drab” and “brown” at first seem close enough to blur together, an effect the horse later rejects. The horse’s nose is “long and hard and still,” and the specks on his lip are “like chalk.” The poem’s eye is patient, almost camera-like, yet the stillness is not empty. When the horse opens his eyes, the child senses that he “began to talk.”
Roberts is careful about what that talking means. It is not speech “out with his mouth,” not “words or noise.” Instead, “the talk was there along his nose; / It seemed and then it was.” That phrase catches how a child’s imagination can hover between guessing and knowing. The horse’s voice arrives through attention rather than sound. The poem is about empathy—not in a sentimental way, but as a kind of close looking that turns into understanding. The child does not hear the horse, yet reports what he said with total confidence.
What the horse says gives the poem its gentle comic edge and its deeper claim. He complains that the day is “hot and slow,” that flies make him shake his skin and get “drowned in his eyes.” Then he addresses the opening comparison directly: “drab was just about / The same as brown, but he was not / A post.” The line break before “A post” makes the denial land with a small thump. The horse insists on his own name and nature: “‘I’m horse,’ he said, ‘that’s what!’” The simplicity of that declaration is the point. He will not be reduced to a fence-holder, a shape, or a color. The child, by listening, grants him that individuality.
The poem’s form supports this mix of plainness and surprise. Six quatrains move in a loose ABCB rhyme scheme, with rhymes such as “chalk” and “talk” and “flies” and “eyes” arriving lightly. The meter is conversational, mostly three or four stresses per line, so the poem feels like a child speaking aloud, unforced and curious. Repeated words like “still,” “talk,” “fence,” and “post” create a small frame. The final stanza returns to stillness. The horse shuts his eyes “as still as they had been before” and tells the child to run along. The moment ends, but the recognition remains.
“Horse” is significant because it treats a child’s imaginative perception as a kind of truth. Roberts does not frame the talking as fantasy or mistake; she lets the moment stand. In a brief, quiet encounter, the poem reminds readers that paying attention to another living thing can undo the habit of seeing it as part of the background. The horse is not a post, and the poem asks us to notice the difference.