In Poetry in the Making, Ted Hughes describes the connection he perceives between capturing animals as a young man and writing poetry as an older one. He compares poetry to animals in the senses that animals “have their own life … and nothing can be added to them or taken away”, and that writing creates “an assembly of living parts moved by a single spirit.” He emphasises the importance for a writer of imagining, very fully and with every sense, what it is that is the focus of the writing, of keeping “your whole being on the thing you are turning into words” and of doing so for some time before writing, so that when the time arrives to write, “it should be regarded as a hundred-yards’ dash.”

This approach, described in the context of poetry, seems to be equally applicable to his short story, ‘The Rain Horse’. An unnamed young man has returned to a remembered scene and found that his recollection has betrayed him. The walk that should have followed “pleasantly-remembered tarmac lanes” turned into a “cross-ploughland trek”, and instead of the “meaningful sensation” he hoped to find, he is plunged into a frightening and disturbing encounter with a black horse.

The protagonist (if the word is appropriate, since it is the horse that instigates the action) has an anthropomorphising reaction to the landscape: it “no longer recognized him”, it made him “feel so outcast”, and while he is able to notice details from all around, the landscape becomes blurred when the rain starts, the rain “dragging its grey broken columns, smudging the trees and the farms.” There is a wealth of visual detail of the landscape, even after the blinding rain has started; there are close-ups, as it were, of the thorny trees, the stones and foxholes in a wooded quarry, the “scurfy bark” of a tree under which he takes shelter. The rain is reassuring in sound, but intensely cold to experience, and inhibiting in its effect. For all its smoky, misty appearance, the rain makes the ground muddy and intractable, and weighs the man down through his sodden clothes. He has not so much underestimated the natural world as misunderstood it, being ill-prepared by memory for the reality of the place, and ill-equipped for the weather.

Whatever world it is into which he is drawn when the rain starts and the horse appears, he is only briefly in synch with it. The horse appears of almost mythological proportions, “tall as a statue”, apparently autonomous, apparently able to move at almost supernatural speed. For a brief space, the man is able to respond in kind. He stops being bored, and irritated, and worried about his suit. He has a “savage energy”, he gives a “tearing roar”, he is able to fend of the horse by throwing stones—bits of the landscape—at it, his aim seems to be “under superior guidance”. But while he does manage to get away, ultimately the experience stays with him; the natural world, bringing him into contact with a bewildering and seemingly illogical aspect of itself, keeps part of him with it.

First published in The London Magazine, February 1960, and available to read online here; collected in Wodwo, Faber and Faber, 1967