Joanna Baillie: The Horse and His Rider
Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) was a female Scottish poet and playwright who gained some renown in her lifetime, fell into relative obscurity after her death, and has been resurrected in the feminist re-evaluation of previously ignored women writers (Slagle 2005). She is an interesting and mostly modern personality whose writing is still worth reading for its clarity and beauty of expression. In her Preface to Fugitive Verses she reveals an engaging frankness and humility as she tries to fit her poetry into its proper place at a time when the heroic male figures of the Romantic literary movement then holding sway were Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and others:
"The occasional pieces for the first time offered to the public have another disadvantage to contend with. Modern Poetry, within these last thirty years, has become so imaginative, impassioned, and sentimental that more homely subjects, in simple diction, are held in comparatively small estimation. This, however, is a natural progress of the art, and the obstacles it may cast in the way of a less gifted, or less aspiring genius, must be submitted to with good grace. Nay, they may even be read with more relish from their very want of the more elevated flights of fancy, from our natural love of relaxation after having had our minds kept in the stretch, by following, or endeavouring to follow more sublime and obscure conceptions" (digital.lib.ucdavis.edu).
Baillie's The Horse and His Rider is a short poem of 22 lines in rhymed couplets. Most of the rhymes have alliterative vowels sounds that match each other acoustically, put some, such as "break" and "neck", "enlock" and "smoke", and "bend" and "sand" merely have the final consonant sound in common.
The language is clearly archaic to the contemporary ear ("thy", "thou", "thine", "rearest", "ring'st", "whilst", "thee") but her mastery of words and her ability to sculpt vivid ...