Four figures ride through "Squire": war, death, famine and pestilence, the horsemen of the apocalypse as Christian tradition, drawing on the Book of Revelation, has handed them down. The poem does not make them roar, though. Each is introduced with something close to courtesy. The title adds a twist, since a squire is not the knight but the one who serves him and carries his equipment. That may explain why the poem lingers on attendants and aftermath rather than on the charge itself. In war's final line, "arms laden with the fruit of war", "arms" works as both limbs and weapons, as if the figure were literally hauling the knight's gear.
The line above the poem ("horsemen | day 25 | seasons") reads like a set of prompts, and the poem answers the last one cleverly. Each horseman is tied to a season, so the four together make a year. War gets summer's heat: a laugh turns into "a blistering hiss." Death gets autumn: "auburn and gold wither, slowly falling / to the dying earth below." Famine gets winter, with "icy lashes" that drop "a hypothermic frost" and a figure "dressed white." Pestilence, with its "blooms" and "seeds," belongs to spring. This is a spring gone wrong, but it is still the season of growth.
The central idea is that destruction rarely looks like destruction. Look at the vocabulary of tenderness: "grace," "gentle," "embrace," "caress," "beacon." War's grace is "a knife," and its "breath [is] gentle though a bloody mouth." Death is not a terror but "a sagely caress, / a truthful beacon to a destination far", a comforting guide, which is more unsettling than a skeleton would be. Even famine, with its "void" eyes full of "want and greed," sings a "swan song" with a "heart heavy for the bodies that fall." The poem suggests these forces are intimate and almost sorrowful, and that makes them harder to resist.
The construction is tidy. There are four sections of six lines, each with a label in vertical bars. Each opens on a metaphor of the form "his grace is a knife," "her embrace is a sagely caress," "his body is a weapon," and the pronouns run his, her, her, his, so the sequence is framed symmetrically. There is no regular rhyme or metre. The line lengths shift, and the music comes from sound: the hard, clipped "clean cut," the soft b's and breathy h's of "breath gentle though a bloody mouth," the smoky hush of "fumes, smoke and ash." Participles such as "exhaling," "crumbling," "dancing" and "tearing" keep the action unfinished, as though it is still happening. Word choice sometimes jolts. "Unseemingly" is an unusual coinage-like word that fits the slippery shift from laugh to hiss, and "hypothermic" is a cold clinical term among otherwise mythic images.
The ending is the most thoughtful part. Pestilence's "festering wounds spill toxic seeds / to seed a famine," which sends the reader back to the third section. The year does not end; it loops, and each horseman feeds the next. Even the closing image, "a crown of what could have been", looks backward at lost possibility rather than forward. Earlier, death's "phoenix flame" hints at rebirth, but the flame is "crumbling," so renewal is offered and then left uncertain.
The poem is worth reading because it takes a very familiar apocalyptic image and makes it intimate, cyclical and quietly sad. The horsemen become seasons, which means catastrophe is not a single end-of-the-world event but something that comes round again, as dependable and as graceful as the weather.