"She Had Some Horses" Response

I can find clear evidence in the poem that the writer is trying to reconcile conflicting personal feelings: "She had horses who lied./ She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped bare of their tongues" (25-6), "She had horses who waited for destruction. /She had horses who waited for resurrection" (36-7) and "She had horses who had no names./ She had horses who had books of names" (31-2). However, at the end of the poem, the writer states that all the horses "were the same horse" (45) and this only intensifies the conflict between them. The speaker's obviously female by the feminine possessive pronoun at the beginning of every line. Usually, looking at these verses, these lines deal with broad, intimate, human feelings like love/hate, truth/deceit, creation/destruction, and how one can be both named and nameless.

I agree with Field that the horses are spirits, neither male nor female because typically, aspects of one's personality are not sexualized. I can see, as a writer myself, that I would probably not make a male/female distinction between my conflicting views of the world when writing a poem such as this.

I see many "clear truths" here being articulated. These "clear truths" are ones about life, about how one feels about oneself, about how being a human means you will forever be inherently conflicted with yourself. The last lines of the poem, for me, at least, help to provide a resolution. I feel this is so because the reader gets a sense of closure, that all of her "horses" are really just parts of herself that need expressing, the inherently conflicted, very human part of her soul. In the end, the reader feels the conjoined-ness of the horses and the poet. This helps to provide closure and resolution.