Now I Will Saddle the Swift Brown Mare
"Now I Will Saddle the Swift Brown Mare" is a lyric poem by Fannie Stearns Davis that expresses a fierce, exhilarating desire to escape the confines of stale, conventional life and ride headlong into wild, elemental freedom. The poem opens with a declaration of intent: the speaker announces she will saddle a swift brown mare and ride toward the dying light of sunset, feeling the wind in her hair and the sharp cold of frost on her breath. From this opening image of purposeful, vigorous movement, the poem proceeds through a series of rejections, each framed by the repeated command to shut doors on the things that weigh and confine. The first door shuts out the world of old books, described as rows of monks clutching scourges and crosses, alongside apes, asses, snakes, and owls. The image is one of dusty, moralistic, and suffocating scholarship or religious orthodoxy — knowledge that has curdled into rigidity and judgment rather than offering genuine illumination or life. The second door shuts out a room of gossips huddled around a hearth over their tea, picking apart the lives of others piece by piece and dropping them with dour condemnation. This figure represents the small-minded social world, the community of surveillance and petty judgment that reduces human experience to material for censure and whispered disapproval. The third door, perhaps the most psychologically intimate of the three, shuts out the speaker's own Moods — personified as faint, pale damsels lying on a silver bed, delicate as petals fallen from white poppies. These are her own introspective, melancholy, and overly refined inner states, the tendency toward passive dreaminess and refined suffering that she now wishes to leave behind just as firmly as she rejects external oppression. Having named and closed off each of these traps — intellectual ossification, social gossip, and her own delicate melancholy — the speaker returns with renewed energy to her central image. Now she does not merely want to ride; she wants to shoe her mare with white-hot stars pulled from the sky and cooled hissing in sea-troughs, to spur the animal with ice sharp as steel from a mountain lake, and to shout to the horse the fierce, joyful song that blows out of the west as the sun breaks apart in its setting. Each of these images is extreme, physical, and elemental — fire, ice, wind, and water all pressed into service for the act of riding free. The penultimate stanza names explicitly what the speaker is weary of: the discourse of "Thus, and So," the mantles that mildew and the swords that rust — inherited postures of authority, whether intellectual, moral, or martial, that have decayed into meaninglessness. She is tired of talk, trouble, and meanness, and frames her escape not as indulgence but as necessity: why stay to be choked with dust? The poem closes by returning almost exactly to its opening lines, with one significant variation. Where the first stanza promised to ride to "the sunset's death," the final stanza promises to ride to "the red world's death," amplifying the scale of the escape from the end of a single day to something more total and cosmic. The repetition of the wind like the hands of a star and the frost catching her breath provides a formal circularity, but the shift in that one phrase — "the red world's death" — suggests that this is not mere restlessness or a temporary outing, but a full, irreversible departure into something vast and consuming. The poem as a whole moves through a structure of rejection and aspiration, turning away from the musty, the petty, the languid, and the decayed, and turning toward speed, cold, fire, and the raw energies of the natural world. Its tone is ecstatic and declarative, celebrating physical vitality and the will to break free from every form of enclosure, whether imposed by tradition, society, or the speaker's own sensitive temperament.
By Fannie Stearns Davis · First published 1917 · Genre: Poetry, Lyric Poetry, Nature Poetry · 311 words
First lines
Now I will saddle the swift brown mare, And ride, and ride, to the sunset's death; With the wind like the hands of a star in my hair, And the white frost snatching my breath!
-- Shut the door where the old books stand Row on row in their musty cowls: Monks, with a scourge and a cross in each hand: Apes, and asses, and snakes, and owls!
What this Textopian page supports
Now I Will Saddle the Swift Brown Mare is listed on Textopian as a poem by Fannie Stearns Davis, dated 1917 CE.
This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.
- Work type: Poem
- Author: Fannie Stearns Davis
- Date: 1917 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric Poetry, Nature Poetry, American Poetry, Romantic Poetry
- Length: 311 words
- Structure: 1 section, 8 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Very Easy (5th Grade or below)
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- Work identity for Now I Will Saddle the Swift Brown Mare by Fannie Stearns Davis
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- Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
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Genres
- Poetry — The title's lyrical, rhythmic quality and the work's structure suggest it is primarily a poetry collection rather than prose fiction.
- Lyric Poetry — The evocative imagery and musical language in the title indicate a focus on emotional expression and sensory description characteristic of lyric poetry.
- Nature Poetry — The reference to a 'swift brown mare' and rural imagery suggests themes centered on natural landscapes and animals.
- American Poetry — Fannie Stearns Davis was an American poet, and her work reflects the American poetry tradition of the early 20th century.
Tags
fiction · American literature · novel · historical fiction · literary fiction · romance · family life · rural life · social realism · early twentieth century · women's lives · domestic drama