Readings of Ted Hughes’s short story,

‘The Rain Horse’

Adrian Burke.
Second in English Dept., Brook School, Sheffield.

I would like to begin this article with a quotation of perhaps disproportionate

length and I hope that the interested reader will bear with me since it contains
for me the seeds of ideas which are still putting down roots and pushing up
shoots. This article is one such root and the work of my pupils are its shoots.
Doris Lessing, writing in her preface to The Golden Notebook raises the crucial
question of what people see when they read a work of the imagination and thus
opens up one of the English teacher’s central concerns:
Questions of what people see when they read a book, and why one person
sees one pattern and nothing at all of another pattern, and how odd it is to
have, as author, such a clear picture of a book, that is seen so very
differently by its readers.
And from this kind of thought has emerged a new conclusion: which is
that it is not only childish of a writer to want readers to see what he sees,
to understand the shape and aim of the novel as he sees it - his wanting
this means that he has not understood a most fundamental point. Which is
that the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote
thought and discussion only when its plan and shape are not understood,
because that moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also
the moment when there isn’t anything more to be got out of it.
(Preface to The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, reprinted in The Novel
Today ed. Malcolm Bradbury.)
This quotation has stayed with me for a long time. I am grateful to it for the way
that it has rendered problematic an area of my teaching and sent me off in quest
of solutions. It raises most eloquently the problem of teaching literature for the
post-structuralist, post-modernist, post-everything teacher who knows he
cannot return to the lost innocence of transmission teaching and still remain
‘authentic’.And yet at the same time it begs another question. Can the teacher
28 English in Education

wholeheartedly subscribe to the doctrine which says that anything the reader
sees in a work of literature is right because it is the response of that particular
individual? The answer lies somewhere, I have always suspected, between
these two extremes. The post-everything English teacher will not tell his class
the meaning of the play but he worries that there will be someone out there
whose odd or quirky views are going unchallenged or unmodified by the
influence of reason.
I decided to allow Ms. Lessing’s view of the process of reading the novel to
inform my work with a Fourth Year group embarking on 16+ English
Language and GCE ‘0’Level English Literature. Yet I would not just accept
whatever the class said, I would find ways of deepening their responses without
ever posturing myself as the ultimate authority on meaning. I began by telling
the class that I did not see them as vessels that needed filling up with knowledge
(i.e. crudely speaking the ‘transmission’ mode of teaching). I told them that I
saw them as people who were perfectly capable of making their own meanings
based on their own responses to what they had read. But because two heads are
better than one and because twenty-eight heads statistically speaking are
probably even better than two, I would be asking them to use ways of learning
that put the onus on them to think for themselves. I don’t imagine the class was
terribly impressed.
We started work on Modern Short Stories edited by Jim Hunter. My aims a t
the outset of the course were as follows:
a) to introduce a number of short stories on the JMB ‘0’Level syllabus.
b) to “promote thought and discussion” of the text’s “plan, shape and
intention’’ (Lessing).
c) to enable students to discover their own responses to the text’s meaning
and to take responsibility for shaping such responses.
d) to avoid explicit teacher-directed learning regarding the texts and their
meaning.
e) to encourage a n awareness of the readingllearning process.
f) to promote a ‘self-consciousness’ of the part played by the reader in
inventing a text’s meaning.
Prior to reading The Rain Horse by Ted Hughes the class had had experience of
the following activities:
1) reading aloud of a story by the teacher.
2) private reading of a short story.
3) shared reading of a short story in groups of four.
4) writing their own questions to the story Tickets Please.
5 ) drawing spider plans around key questions to Tickets Please.
6) voicing in groups initial reaction Peaches (Dylan Thomas).
7) making a flow diagram of the structure of Peaches.
8) writing a ‘better’ beginning to Peaches (most students felt the original
structure was flawed).
9) examining link passages in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Thurber).
10) writing pastiche ‘Secret Lives of .......’.
11) analysing each other’s stories in terms of structure, looking particularly at
the link passages.
12) doing one hour of ‘reading for pleasure’ every week.
On the morning of the 11th October 1984, the class came into the room to find
a duplicated letter on their desks and they saw me with a cassette player a t the
side of the room. The letter is printed below in its entirety.
 ‘The Rain Horse’ 29

Dear English Student,

This morning’s lesson is going to be a bit different from the ones you
have had recently. I hope you will be sensible about adapting to the
change and I also hope you will take full advantage of the any opportunity
it gives you to think in a new way about a story.
This is what is going to happen. I want you to read to yourself a story
from the collection we have been studying and a t the same time listen to a
tape of music that you will not be familiar with. I will also want you to do
some writing before, during and after you have read the story.
Here is the order of things for you to do. Please follow this order exactly
since it will be important for everyone in the room to follow the same
procedure.
1) Before you begin to read the story write a paragraph describing how
you feel a t this precise moment. Try to explain your feelings.
2) Now turn to page 55 of Modern Short Stories and begin to read ‘The
Rain Horse’. Try your hardest to concentrate on the story and ignore
distractions.
3) Stop reading the story when you reach the end of the paragraph on
page 61 whose final words are: “without any more nonsense”. Listen to the
music playing for a minute then write down on the paper what thoughts
have occurred to you in connection with the story you are reading. Read
through what you have written and add to it if you wish.
4) Now read the story right through to its end. When you have finished
reading close the book and lay it on the table.
5) Listen to the music for a minute (time it with a watch if you have
one - but don’t disturb other readers around you).
6 ) Now write down as precisely as you can what your feelings are. Has the
story affected you? How? Has the music affected you? How? What images
or thoughts seemed to come into your mind as if uninvited? Write down
your reactions to the story in as much detail as you can, using any of the
methods you have been taught e.g. questions, spider diagrams, flow
charts, creative writing etc.
7) On a practical note: comment on this lesson. Did it work for you? Did
the music assist or hinder your reading? Did you like working in isolation
like this?
8) If you finish this work and other people are still working have a quiet
~

look a t another story.

The music I played the class while they read and wrote was ‘Phaedra’ by the
German group Tangerine Dream. It is a swirling kind of wallpaper music that
inspires vague, shapeless emotions that I hoped would complement the
experience of Hughes’ story.
The rationale behind the treatment of this particular short story was firstly
that I wanted the students to find this, their first reading of ‘The Rain Horse’,
memorable. Therefore I did not wish to introduce this story to the class in the
same way that I had brought them to ‘Peaches’or ‘Tickets Please’. In a very real
sense the unique nature of each story coupled with the developmental stage of
the class defies a uniform method of teaching. Secondly I wanted to create the
space for the individual student to think for herself without having to enforce
the need “to work on her own” a t the time when she needed to do that - a t the
opening, when she read it for the first time. Thirdly, I wanted the students to
have an exaggeratedly heightened consciousness of the process of reading the
story. I thought that they might see new patterns in the text if they were asked
30 English in Education

to read in an unorthodox manner so I made an accustomed process ‘strange’.

As an exercise in disrupting the students’ ‘stock responses’ it will be seen
from their writings that they were forced for the time being to restructure their
ordinary perceptions of reality. And because they were being invited to take
part in a n unrepeatable kind artistic/critical experience I could not avoid being
aware of the performance element to the work. I very much wanted them to
learn that they were colluding in an experience that they were doing to
themselves as much as it was being done by their teacher or by the text or by the
music. In this sense the students were cast in the role of audience in the
Brechtian sense of the word:
In so far as the audience is made to pass judgments on the performance
and the actions it embodies, it becomes a n expert collaborator in an
open-ended practice, rather than the consumer of a finished object . . . The
play is thus an experiment, . . . it is incomplete in itself, completed only by
the audience’s reception of it.
(Marxism and Literary Criticism by Terry Eagleton, page 66)
The moment when I pressed the PLAY button on the cassette player and their
heads went down was highly charged with many perhaps conflicting emotions.
For me it was plagued with the knowledge that the time for theory was past and
now success in action was the only touchstone that mattered.
How the experience worked for the students is shown in their comments
written before and after they had read the story. The combination of the music,
the embargo on any kind of talk and the agenda worksheet heightened the
students’ awareness of the reading process. Typical of their response was
Tracy’s comment in answer to Cue No. 1.
At this moment I feel quite happy and secure with my friends all around
me. I feel relaxed and ready to read the story.
Having read the story to the accompaniment of the music she felt able to write
(in response to Cue No. 7):
I have enjoyed reading the story very much. It was a completely different
way of reading it. The way the music assisted it made it even better. The
music seemed to change as the story did.
While they worked I sat a t my desk and recorded my own observations of the
class a t work. Here are some of the ‘events’ which I noted during the forty
minute session.
9.33. Tracy - after staring into space - picks up pen and then looks a t the
letter. She has begun to write. Rachel Williams has picked up her pen,
goes to write and stops twice.
9.42. Tracy appears to have finished reading. Thank heavens no one is
grinning or acting as if this whole exercise is stupid.
9.59. Wendy is writing. Cannot see Joanne. Sharon Clark has fallen
asleep!! Jane and Alison notice and discuss her in hushed voices.
10.02. Good morning! Sharon has woken up. Some people have
finished - whatever that means.
10.06. There is a kind of spell of silence which will need breaking soon. It
begins to feel like a corset.
If we follow one pupil’s experience of this story/music session we may get an
idea of what was brought forth. The numbers of Rachel’s comments correspond
 ‘The Rain Horse’ 31

to the Cue Numbers on the original agenda sheet.

1) A t this moment I feel a bit confused because I have never read a story in
this way before. I don’t feel very confident about being able to concentrate
with that weird music playing. Yet at the same time I can’t wait to see if I
WILL be able to concentrate, and understand the story.
2) I think this story gives a very vivid description of the scene and what
the man is thinking. The story made me feel like I was the man and when
he saw the horse as he came out of the wood I almost literally jumped
because I was so involved in the story. At first the music distracted me but
then, as I persevered, I found I could ignore it.
3) I thought this story was well written, and enjoyable to read. It leaves
many questions unanswered like ~

a. What was the man doing there anyway?

b. Why had he returned after twelve years?
c. *Was the horse all in his imagination?
d. Why was he scared when he saw it for the first time, before it tried to
hurt him?
As the music stopped being a distraction I found that it provided a suitable
background to the story and as I read more I found myself listening to the
music and fitting it to the story as I went along.
I was very pleased to see Rachel jotting down these questions about the story.
She puts into practice a technique learned earlier in the year maybe prompted
by a suggestion in the agenda sheet. In so doing she is consciously developing
“interpretative procedures which can be applied to a range of language uses”. I
have borrowed this description from H. G. Widdowson’s Stylistics and the
Teaching of Literature because it usefully stresses that the ‘how’ of reading is
more valuable as a focus for education than the ‘what’.What Rachel is learning
is how to tackle any text regardless of its literary merit, whatever that word
may mean. Her list of questions shows that her response to the story is
principally concerned with making sense of the narrative. Questions (a) and (b)
confront directly the problems of story. That is to say that Rachel is trying to
decide what happened in the story before the point at which the author begins
the narrative on the page. She is thus having to invent for herself a likely
hypothesis. Widdowson in Stylistics describes this phenomenon, which was in
fact the taking-off point for nearly every student in the class that day.
As the story progresses we learn who is being referred to. Whereas in
ordinary discourse, then, pronouns derive their value retrospectively
from what has preceded, in literary discourse it is common for them to
derive their value prospectively from what follows. Again it is the
discourse itself which provides for the deficiency in meaning which arises
from the isolation of the discourse from any wider context.
It is this ‘deficiency of meaning’ which seems to provide Rachel with the need to
answer her own questions and to make sense of the reading experience by
‘fitting’ the music into the story. The sense of her comments here suggests a
predictive mode where meaning happens by accumulation and accretion.
It should be pointed out here that Rachel’s response to the story was only one
of the modes selected by students. Rachel habitually went into writing before
testing out her ideas orally even with the other students on her table. Some
~

students lacked the confidence to frame their thoughts into questions. This is
not surprising given the fact that traditionally in schools students are expected
32 English in Education

to produce answers not questions. The most common form of expression chosen
by such students was a ‘string of analysis’ approach in which one chance
remark once recorded would lead to another. Tracy, for example, notes first
that the story has brought about a change in her; she now feels a partial
identification with the anonymous hero of the story. However, her sense of
confusion in part alienates her from it. From this recognition she plunges back
into the story with a discussion of the nature of the horse. This was a crucial
concern for all the students who, like Tracy, moved away from the rain horse
only to return to again later. This is what Tracy actually wrote to Cue No. 3:
I do not feel the same as I did a t the beginning of the story. I feel slightly
isolated - like a man in the story. I am also confused about the story. It is
very weird and exciting. The music added to the effect and made the horse
sound almost magical, like a figment of the man’s imagination. The horse
seemed to want to trap the man in the wood and to frighten him. It seems
as if the horse was as lonely as the man. The town sounds a mysterious
place where you could imagine things like this would happen. Something
about the horse must have been very special to stick in his mind a t first
sight. Maybe it reminded him of something? Why was it suddenly violent?
The rain added effect to the story, the writer used a lot of words to describe
the man’s physical state.
We return now to an examination of the rest of Rachel’s comments.
7. I think the choice of music was good because it helps you to imagine you
are there and its all happening to you. I find this helpful when I am trying
to understand something as complex as this story. I think that the lesson
worked for me and I was assisted rather than hindered by the music once I
got used to it. I liked working in isolation like this because I found I could
concentrate better and clarify my thoughts.
*I got very involved in the story and it made me feel a part of it, as if I were
the man and it was all happening to me, I think the music helped there. I
think the horse was imagined and the man thought it was chasing him
because he’d come back to this place to escape from something and it was
his way of showing himself that he couldn’t run away from his problems.
The most important sensation that Rachel reports back on is the feeling of
involvement in the story. Earlier on she had said: “The story made me feel like I
was the man and when he saw the horse as he came out of the wood I almost,
literally jumped because I was so involved in the story”. This admirably
captures the reader’s sense of being two people: both the spectator and the
actor. It certainly also conveys Rachel’s understanding of the relationship
between reader and writer in the ‘making’ of a text. There is also the
acknowledgement that the story is ‘complex’and Rachel’s final asterisked note
draws my attention t o the still unanswered questions to be dealt with - perhaps
in a re-reading of the story. She still only thinks “the horse was imagined”, that
the man was running from an undefined “something” and his problems are not
fleshed out by Rachel.
This then was a first ‘reading’ of The Rain Horse. In my own notebook near
the end of the music/story session I wrote that the obvious follow-up for the
next week was to play the music again and go for creative writing. This remark
was immediately followed by another idea, which did in fact provide the next
stage in the scheme of work; I wrote this: “banda off their comments pulling
together ones which all the class should see”. I collected in the students’
 ‘The Rain Horse’ 33

notebooks at the end of the lesson and that night prepared a ‘digest’ of their
comments which I then ran off on a spirit duplicator and gave to the class the
following day. (For a copy of this digest see Appendix I). The students were
naturally curious to see what their peers had made of the experience and they
talked through their comments with each other in a very informal way. This
made for a lively session in contrast to the repressively silent atmosphere of the
previous day. The homework task set for that evening was to write an ‘essay’
entitled: ‘Our reaction to a first reading of ‘The Rain Horse’ on 11th October’.
During her first reading of ‘The Rain Horse’ Rachel had said that the
musiclreading lesson had ‘worked’ for her because she liked working in
‘isolation’ since this assisted both concentration and clarification of her
thoughts. I suspect it also postponed the inevitable outcome of nearly all
English lessons: words either written down or spoken out aloud. Having to
examine the random thoughts of her fellow students and discuss their ideas in
writing offered her the chance to work on words outside herself. It incidentally
gave her in a very real sense the experience of weighing up the opinions of the
critics. What are critics, after all, if they aren’t fellow readers? Encountering
the ideas and reactions of other people enabled Rachel to sift through to find
which she agrees with and which she does not. In the process she may have
come a little closer to finding out what she makes of this strange story. This is
what she wrote; it needs to be read in conjunction with the material contained
in Appendix I.
I think that everyone in the class arrived at the conclusion that the horse
was in the man’s imagination and I think that this image could well be
portraying some event that happened either there, or elsewhere, in the
past, as Elizabeth Seaman suggests.
Many people, including myself, thought that he was, for some reason,
disappointed with his return to that area. I agree with Mark Green when
he says that the man probably hoped the place would have changed after
twelve years. And as Kathryn Reaney says, he was worried by his total
lack of concern for an area which has probably played an important role
in his life.
Like Michael Tutt, my mental picture of the story was grey. I think this
was probably quite a common vision of the story, because a downpour can
give a greyish tinge to the real landscape.
I don’t really agree with Alan Fatollahay when he says many people
have a fear of horses, because I think he is implying that the man imagines
all after seeing a real horse or something along those lines, I feel there is a
more complicated or possibly emotional reason for this vision.
Suzanne Green, Jennifer Somerville and Sharon Clark all felt, as I did
that the piece of writing was very realistic and involved the reader to such
an extent that they thought they were part of it.
I didn’t think, like Wendy Baines, that the horse was a warning for the
future, I saw it more as a revived memory from the past.
As a reader I find it interesting that the repetitions running through Rachel’s
tentative piece here are to do with: thinking, feeling, agreeing, disagreeing,
visualising, comparing. As a teacher I know that Rachel has travelled a long
way in a short space of time and I feel quite awestruck. After all the analysis
and the academic barrage to support my case I have to admit that I do not quite
know what this student has been through.
I have offered the reader a rationale for working on a text using music but I
34 English in Education

think there is a more profound reason for such activity in the English
classroom. Language, as the post-everything teacher is aware, is only a map to
the territory, ‘it is not the territory itself (Moffett). To ask students to use
language to describe the effect a story has wrought on them is doomed to failure
from the outset. The kotten English teacher should know full well that every
decoding is another encoding. As they read the students might momentarily
have grasped something whole (notice how often Rachel used this word) but
when they write they will feel the meaning as entity crumble and slip in
fragments between their fingers.
If we agree that language is too crude an instrument to match reality itself
then we might assume that Ted Hughes felt he had failed to name the reality he
sought when writing ‘The Rain Horse’. If Hughes’ story points the reader
towards a landscape that defies representation in ordinary language then
maybe, just maybe music will allow out students to go wordless to that territory
and return to construct by some kind of general agreement a map of where they
have been.
James Moffett has argued the importance of all the non-verbal arts in
education because of their power to ‘offset the strictures imposed by verbal
thought.. . to suspend inner speech’. It certainly might be argued from this
that the proper way to think about literature may not be in terms of words a t
all. In the case of ‘The Rain Horse’ experiment, for example, the teacher did not
need to have selected the music and forced a Hobson’s choice on the class. It
would have been quite practicable to have put the burden of choice on the class
although such a strategy would have shifted the emphasis of the whole lesson.
Then again the class could have been set the task of making their own musical
accompaniment for the story. The resources of art (painting, drawing, collage,
3D work) should also be wheeled into the English classroom not as a bit of fun
or an end of term prank but as a central activity that helps us make sense of the
words we use to make sense of the world. English teachers, I would suggest, are
far too naive about the social tyrant ‘language’; we ought occasionally a t least
to oppose its dominance and restore a sense to our students of the authority of
their subjectivity.
I have chosen to end this description of two days’ English lessons, which add
up to no more than three hours’ work for the students involved, by offering two
appendices. The first is a copy of the ‘digest’ given to students for writing their
first piece on the short story. The second appendix is a short list of records that
might prove fruitful if matched to the right piece of prose or poetry. I suggest
though that it might be far better for the interested English teacher to work
alongside the specialist Music teacher in the school, who should be far better
informed and resourced than the writer of this article.
(I am indebted to Wilf Summerbell of Waingels Copse School, Reading for help
in re-drafting this article.)
 ‘The Rain Horse’ 35

Appendix I
Here is a digest of the class’s reactions to a first reading of The Rain Horse.
Write an essay in your notebooks entitled: ‘Our reactions to a first reading of
“The Rain Horse” when read on 11th October.’

Your reactions:
“if the horse is a figment of his imagination, does it have a significant meaning,
is it portraying something that happened to him in the past” - Elizabeth
Seaman .
“he was disappointed that he did not feel a t home in his home town, the home
area” - Joanna Pilling.
“he had so much wanted it to be different or something happen which wasn’t
the same as 12 years before, when everything was the same he was so
disappointed so he invented the horse in his own mind” - Mark Green.
“my mental picture of the story took place in shades of grey” - Michael Tutt.
“the rain added effect to the story” - Tracy Baxendale.
“did the man used to live there? and send someone off for trespassing or was he
trespassing 12 years ago and if so why has he come back?” - Mandy Wood.
“perhaps he was so disturbed by his own lack of feeling for this place which
should have held so much nostalgia for him” - Kathryn Reaney.
“I think a lot of people have this kind of fear against horses” - Alan Fatollahay.
“I could almost imagine being there, terrified by the horse, having no one to
turn to, nowhere to go” - Suzanne Green.
“I could almost put myself in the position of the man, I could almost see the
town, and the woods, sheltering for cover” - Jennifer Somerville.
“I got very involved in the story and it made me feel part of it, as if I were the
man and it was all happening to me” - Rachel Williams.
“conscious only of the story nothing else. Somebody could have dropped a
bomb and I probably wouldn’t have noticed. . . not many stories have that
quality but I enjoyed it” - Deborah Johnson.
“I feel that the man went back to revive childhood memories, I think the rain
horse was part of his memory; the horse may have been trying to warn him of
something” - Wendy Baines.
“he thought of himself as an outsider now, and partly because he did not want
to be recognised by the land as he had remembered the land but it wouldn’t
accept him, he got angry” - Rachel Hurst.
“The story has affected me. I feel as I would if I’d been woken by a nightmare in
the middle of the night. Trying to get rid of the images but they just reappear
stronger” - Paul Ashmore.
“The horse seems to me to be some kind of nightmarish reality for the
man . . . very strange, almost frightening” - Sharon Clark.
36 English in Education

Appendix I1
List of records to accompany a reading, including record company and
catalogue number.
Walter Carlos’ Clockwork Orange, CBS 573059.
The Chieftains 5, Island Records, ILPS 9334.
Electronic Music, Turnabout Records, TV 3400 S.
Hergest Ridge, Virgin Records, VBOX 1.
Apocalypse, CBS, 69076.
The Dark Side of the MoonlPink Floyd, EMI, SHVL 804.
Ummagumma/Pink Floyd, EMI, SHDW 1.
Pauane pour une infante defuntelRave1, EMI, CFP 40036.
Concerto de AranjuezlRodrigo, CBS, 60104.
2001: A Space Odyssey, MGM Records, C 8078.
PhaedralTangerine Dream, Virgin Records, V 2025.
Tallis FantasialVaughan Williams, EMI, CFP 40068.
War of the WorldslJeff Wayne, CBS, 96000.

References

Bradbury, Malcolm (ed.). The Novel Today, Fontana, 1977.

Arnold, Roslyn (ed.). Timely Voices, Oxford, 1983 (contains the essay by James
Moff ett .)
Hunter, Jim (ed.). Modern Short Stories, Faber, 1964.
Hawkes, Terence Structuralism and Semiotics, Methuen, 1977.
Eagleton, Terry Marxism and Literary Criticism, Methuen, 1976.
Heaney, Seamus Death of a Naturalist, Faber, 1966.
Widdowson, H. G. Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature, Longman, 1975.