Louis Simpson’s “The Troika” moves like the sleigh of its title—swift, moonlit, and only half in control. What begins as a wintry folk journey quickly becomes a dream, and the central insight is that the speaker is not really traveling through a forest but through the landscapes of memory and desire. The ride carries him past chess-playing graybeards, ragged guardsmen, a forgotten errand, a strange girl, and finally the sea. Each image feels vivid yet governed by dream logic rather than waking sequence.
The poem’s form enacts that instability. It uses no regular rhyme or meter, yet the repeated cry “Troika, troika!” gives the ride a pulse. That cry returns three times, and the troika itself means a team of three; by the end the “three white horses” are the clearest emblem of the journey. The lines are irregular and often enjambed, so one scene slides into the next without explanation. Short exclamations interrupt the flow, especially the jolt of “A nightmare! I have lost my father’s horses!”, as if the dreamer has suddenly fallen from control.
Within this loose form, Simpson places a handful of sharp images. The “snow moon” makes the forest cold and enchanted, but “lamplight like a knife” turns shelter into something dangerous. The two graybeards bending over chess seem half mythic, and the speaker’s question—“Does he hear me passing?”—blurs the line between the living and the ghostly. The next line makes that blur explicit: “his spirit hears my spirit passing.” The rider belongs to the scene as much as he observes it.
From that uncanny moment, the poem moves into history. The houses vanish; the moon looks over “fields / littered with debris”; guardsmen stand in tattered rags. The fairytale forest now looks like a landscape after war. This is not only a private dream but a dream touched by collective ruin. Then the scene shifts again, even more abruptly: “I walk across a field, bound on an errand. / The errand’s forgotten—something depended on it.” The forgotten errand captures the dream’s anxiety: something vital has slipped away, but the mind cannot recover it. That feeling attaches itself to “my father’s horses,” the inherited power that drives the sleigh. To lose them is to lose the very means of moving through memory.
The poem’s last movement softens that fear. A white bird rises, leads the speaker through the forest, then vanishes with a cry when held; in its place a girl sits combing her black hair, her lips glistening with dew. The erotic and the magical fuse here, but the vision cannot be kept. Yet the closing lines do not return to nightmare. Morning breaks, the sea gleams, and the white bird is “flying through the world, across the sea.” The enchanted thing does not disappear; it escapes.
That final openness is what makes “The Troika” significant. Rather than explaining the forgotten errand or identifying the guardsmen, the poem trusts the way dreams compress personal anxiety, historical memory, and fairy-tale desire into a single journey. The reader leaves with the sensation of having ridden through a mind at night, where loss is real but movement continues, and where the white bird of imagination may survive the sleeper’s waking.