The Farrier Flashcards
What does the use of the pronoun ‘she’ encourage?
Use of the pronoun ‘she’ encourages us to extend the horse as a representation of all females. Patriarchal nature.
How is The Farrier similar to Winter Swans?
They both use an animal to parallel a relationship.
Analyse ‘he is careful not to look her in the eye’.
This may suggest that the farmer is initially guilty at the un-natural way that he is about to alter the horse’s physicality.
What does ‘knackered car’ suggest?
It is also indicative of an emotional reserve – there is no sense that the farmer wishes to comfort the horse and put her at ease before he does what he does to her, but rather treats her like a ‘knackered car’, another archetypal male image.
What does knacker also mean?
Someone who buys a horse to slaughter.
However, what suggests a growing intimacy between the farrier and mare?
During the act of hoofing there are descriptions such as ‘a romantic lead dropping to the lips of his lover’ and ‘cutting moon-sliver clippings’.
What suggests that the Farrier has been emasculated?
By the end of the poem, the care and delicacy with which the farrier performs his work leaves him in an almost emasculated role, described as ‘a seamstress pinning the dress of the bride’.
What does this emasculation suggest?
Masculinity is just another ‘role’
What do we feel by the end of the poem?
Sympathetic toward the horse who feels discomfort at walking on unnatural ground in unnatural shoes. This works as both a comment on man’s alteration of nature as well as the ways that women’s lives are effected by men.
What poem does the idea of labelling compare to?
Mark in Time, in which the woman has been scarred.
What does the awkward sound of the horse walking reflect?
The high heels of Sheers’ lover later on in the collection – high heels being a representation of women’s need to dress up for their men?
