The Centaur (1954). Content and Description

This poem is an imaginative description of a 10-year- old child’s summer activities. A recurring theme in Swenson’s poetry is the fusing of animal and human behavior to illuminate her reader’s understanding of both worlds, and “The Centaur” is a perfect example of how these metaphors work in her poetry.

The poem begins with a child who goes out to play in a willow grove. She cuts a willow with her brother’s jackknife and fashions it into “a long, limber horse / with a good thick knob for a head” and “a few leaves for the tail.” She cinches her brother’s belt “around his head for a rein” and then goes riding. As her play intensifies, she imagines herself as “the horse and the rider, / and the leather I slapped to his rump / spanked my own behind.” At this moment, the reader begins to see the significance of this poem’s title clearly.

But the poem is about more than a simple summer afternoon. Because the speaker in the poem is wearing a dress, we understand that she is, indeed, female. But, the imagery throughout the poem underscores her desire to be more like her brother. She has his belt and his jackknife, and she takes pleasure in riding the willow as it jounces between her thighs.

In this poem Swenson is engaging in a playful dialogue that challenges conventional gender roles. But, when the little girl returns from her adventures, her mother asks what she has been doing because of her startling appearance: The child is a mess. She does not look neat and clean, as a girl should. Her hair is out of place and her dress is stretched out from the weight of the jackknife in her pocket. Although the mother in this poem tells her daughter to “go tie back your hair,” she also does not scold her for playing too roughly.

This poem playfully and joyfully allows the young girl to “try on” the different identities of both horse and boy, suggesting, through the imagery of a centaur, that a nice balance between the characteristics of human and animal, male and female, might be able to coexist peacefully in one child’s personality and might even be acceptable to a concerned mother.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Write a poem about a specific childhood memory from which a larger meaning can be extrapolated. Use specific imagery like feelings, sounds, smells, textures, and even taste.

2. After reading “The Centaur,” read also “The Ballad of the Light-Eyed Little Girl” by Gwendolyn Brooks, “My Lost Youth” by Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, “There Was a Child Went Forth” by Walt Whitman, and “Rough” by Stephen Spender. Compare and contrast the different poetic forms found in these five poems with similar subject matter.

3. Ezra Pound said: “Poetry is a centaur. The thinking, word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties.” Swenson quoted this passage in an article called “The Poet as Anti-Specialist.” How does this illuminate your reading of “The Centaur”?