Anyone who has watched a child gallop a broomstick across the lawn knows the pleasure of imagining a mount that doesn't exist. I. L. Salomon starts from that pleasure and then does something unexpected with it. «I Shall...» begins as a flight of fancy, a speaker riding "my little horse / Like a charger up the sky," and ends as a vow to bear witness for the young who die in other people's wars. The play and the grief are not in tension; the play is how the grief gets said.
The word "little" is the first clue to the poem's tone. The horse is small, affectionate, almost a toy, yet it carries the dignity of a "charger" and the impossible equipment of wings. Salomon keeps the speaker physically anchored even at the height of the fantasy: "earth-dew at my feet, / Moon-dew on my face, / And the planet's gravitation / Holding me in place." The paired dews are lovely, and they place the speaker between two worlds. Flight never becomes escape. The speaker rises while still held by the earth, and that is exactly the stance of someone who intends to look down and report what they see.
The refrain-like "I shall" that opens each stanza on a line of its own gives the poem its shape. It works as a series of promises, each one heavier than the last. The first stanza promises only motion. The second promises discipline: "Nor swerve from the course, / My five senses gaited / To my little horse." "Gaited" is a horseman's word, borrowed to describe the speaker's perceptions trained to move in step with the animal, so the whole body becomes part of the riding. In the third stanza the promise turns moral: to "tell of the envenomed / Lusts that bridle men." The image is neat and a little cruel. Bridles belong to horses, and Salomon hands them to the destructive appetites that steer human beings, so the speaker's willing, winged mount is set against the harness that greed and violence put on people.
Sound supports this movement without calling attention to itself. The rhymes are loose and sometimes arrive late or slant: "course" and "horse," "sweet" and "Street," "tears" and "years." The effect is closer to a sustained hoofbeat than to a tidy song, and the short lines keep a canter-like pace. The stanzas also quietly widen their view. The first is personal, the second names a specific loss, the third zooms out to "the world's gone wrong," and the fourth looks across all of time at "the innocent who lose / Tomorrows."
That loss is the poem's emotional centre, and it is handled with notable restraint. The "War-youth lately come / To Eternity Street" is a startling coinage; death is an address, a street the newly arrived have only just reached. Nothing in the text pins this to a particular war, and it would be a mistake to invent one. What the poem gives us is the general fact of young people killed, along with the speaker's "hunger for the lovely, heart-break for the sweet," a pairing that suggests grief and appetite for beauty are the same faculty seen from two sides.
The stars do the most work in the second half. First they are witnesses: "a million starry eyes / Blink to hide the tears / They have hidden from the earth's / Sad children down the years." There is something tender in the idea that the heavens have been quietly weeping and sparing us the sight. Then, in the final stanza, the stars become a gift. The horse's hooves kick them off "like golden pebbles flung / In sparks," and the last line, "For the imperishable young!", is the only one in the poem to end with an exclamation mark. After so much "tomorrows" lost, the poem refuses to let the young be merely victims; the sparks are their memorial and their inheritance.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it turns an old impulse, the winged horse of myth and childhood, toward consolation. The speaker cannot undo the "ruthless" or stop the world from threatening to go wrong "again." But the poem insists on a response anyway: mark the stars, tell the truth, throw light at the dark. It is a small horse doing a large job, and the poem knows both things at once.