A Study Guide for Ted Hughes's "The Rain Horse"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Ted Hughes's "The Rain Horse," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535839136

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The Rain Horse

Ted Hughes

1960

Introduction

The Rain Horse is a psychologically charged tale by English author Ted Hughes about an episode that occurs when a young man makes a nostalgic return to the countryside he ranged as a youth. In his introduction to his collection Difficulties of a Bridegroom, Hughes classes The Rain Horse as autobiographical in inspiration. Thus, the protagonist is readily perceived as a stand-in for the author himself—except the circumstances of the protagonist are mostly glossed over within the story, leaving the specifics of his background all but irrelevant to the immediate action. The reader is told little beyond the fact that the young man is wearing a new grey suit.

Decked out in this suit, which is getting unfortunately muddied by the sodden ground, the man is disappointed when he arrives at the hilltop overlooking the farmland he knew so well to find that it looks familiar but stirs no emotions; it does not really know him anymore. He turns to leave—but out of the corner of his eye spots a black horse running along through the rain in the field ahead. When the horse reaches a distant crest of the same hill and shows a curious profile while crossing over, the man is awestruck, sensing an uncommon significance in the horse. What proceeds to happen proves his impression right. The Rain Horse was written in 1958 and published first in Harper's in January 1960 and then in several other periodicals. The story was included in Hughes's volume of verse and short fiction Wodwo in 1967 as well as in Difficulties of a Bridegroom in 1995.

Author Biography

Edward James Hughes was born on August 17, 1930, in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, England, as the youngest of three children. Mytholmroyd is located in the well-saturated Calder Valley in the midst of moors and farmland, while more broadly Yorkshire is known as a rural, working-class region. Hughes has related that he was always fascinated by animals, with his activities ranging from playing with toy animals, to drawing and making models of animals, to retrieving the rats, weasels, rabbits, magpies, and owls that his brother shot while hunting. Yorkshire's West Riding dialect would come to characterize Hughes's poems, which offer a unique combination of literary ambition and proletarian speech patterns, reflecting the concision and directness borne of honest, hardworking communities. When Hughes was seven, the family moved to Mexborough, South Yorkshire, where he attended school with the children of railwaymen and miners.

Hughes was writing poems by age fifteen, much of them—like those about Zulu warfare and the Wild