Andrew Forster ‘Horse Whisperer’ Analysis TWO: GCSE AQA English tutor Bolton, Manchester.

In stanza two of Andrew Forster’s Horse Whisperer , we discover yet more of the special knowledge of these healers and their practices. The community’s  desperation  is again conveyed through repetition and a lexis that resembles nightmare or even apocalypse: ‘They shouted for me/when their horses reared at the burning straw/and eyes revolved in stately heads.‘ Here, we hear the urgent need of the farmers and the use of enjambment communicates the overwhelming horror of the events which can only be remedied through the expert intervention of a horse whisperer.

Look at the poet’s evocation of the ‘burning straw’ and the horses whose   ‘eyes revolved’.  Only the most resourceful and expert could cope in such terrible circumstances and as I suggested there is something ‘hellish’ about these events.  Indeed it is as if the world is collapsing and the animals’ terror mirrors the exclamations of their owners who ‘shouted’ out of desperate need for their saviour(the horse whisperer) to come.

The Whisperer therefore shows loyalty and care for the farmers and their animals and this is ironic when we see how badly the whisperers are discarded and even demonized , once they are outdated or no longer considered necessary.

The fear of the horses is represented through a frantic lexis that culminates in the extraordinary  medicine of the ‘frog’s wishbone’ that is ‘tainted by meat’. We are in a peculiar territory here and find the practices almost magical and certainly artfully secret. These are arts that have been passed on through generations of horse whisperers, signifying tradition, resourcefulness and power. We can vividly imagine and see these scenes and so the past is resurrected before us by the modern poet whose testimony reanimates ancient practices destroyed by the rational and the mechanical.

I am struck by the psychological artfulness and wisdom of the ‘tainted’ wishbone. ‘ ..a new fear to fight the fear of fire’ , a wisdom that presumably has been gained through experience and experiment. Such wisdom is however for the benefit of the horses too. They escape fire and find ‘safety‘ as if they are ‘helpless children‘. There is tenderness here in these words and phrases and the simile reveals once again the elemental friendship and intimacy between horse and healer.

I am also struck by the poet’s clever use of the conditional tense in this stanza: ‘would‘ and ‘could‘ anchored to a first person speaker.   This reveals that the choices made by the whisperers are carried out repeatedly through time. Forster has the emotional intelligence or knowingness to reveal that expertise comes with refining one’s art through repeated practice. Once again  we are reminded of the age old, generational aspect to these traditions.

We are lead out of the hectic equine misery of this second stanza into the solace and comfort of the word ‘safety’. This word is significantly the final word of the stanza and easefully supports the simile ‘like helpless children  perhaps aligning the readers’ own fears of  fire and loss, with those of the panicked horses, whose trust in the whisperer saves them.

Perhaps the stanza does suggest a certain hypnotic power too. Clearly  the horses are bewitched in a sense by their own fear of the wishbone onto choosing a lesser fear in order to escape.

The end stop at the word safety is therefore a sign of relief and security for the horses, the farmers and significantly  the reader  years later from the original events. The intensity of the description makes the events seem immediate and very intimate  yet we are about to recognise our own role and even culpability in the erosion of these traditions.