The setting, the horses, and the chorus

Citation: Platte, Ryan. Equine Poetics. Hellenic Studies Series This comparison is, I believe, without Homeric precedent. Thus, there is mythological precedent for translating the phrase as it appears.

In this scene Alan relives his first encounter with a horse ‘On a beach’.

Furthermore this clearly reveals an association between horses and sexuality which would make very good sense in this lyric. If this reading is correct, it makes this association an explicit part of the symbology of the lyric. The inherent association of horses with sexuality is an important motivating force in the hippological comparisons used throughout this lyric.

Clearly there is much more at work here than simply comparing the girl to a horse because of their shared beauty.

The setting is now Dalton's stables.

In fact, the power dynamic assumed in ancient Greek erotic relationships is presumably an important part of the logic of the erotic hippomorphic comparisons. The breaking of the horse and the nature of its relationship to men cooperate in the phenomenon of hippomorphic imagery. The point here is the stereotyping of the beautiful woman as useless, and thus less desirable than she may initially seem.

Additionally, Gregory has shown that comparisons of horses and donkeys in ancient Greek are frequently coded as discussions of social and economic hierarchy. We see sex, hippomorphism, and male power linked even more clearly and explicitly than in the literary passages, but this same assemblage of themes can be documented throughout these texts, and they are the same themes that are joined in the PIE horse sacrifice.

In this case the man is apparently aging and presumably not as attractive as he once was, so he is merely an old stallion. This work imports the symbology of epic with its equation of the horse and hero, thereby activating the metaphor of courtship as competition, and hence war, so conventional in amatory poetry.