The Flying Change by Henry Taylor

First published: 1974; collected in The Flying Change, 1985

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“The Flying Change” is a short poem; in its two distinct parts the speaker establishes a metaphor comparing a maneuver that is taught to a cantering horse to a stance the speaker has adopted for his own life. The poem’s two parts are numbered, as if to underscore their distinctive characters, and they look quite different on the page and exhibit very different voices.

Part 1 is a prose poem, set out on the page like a standard paragraph. It sounds rather like a textbook on horsemanship in its explanation of the flying change maneuver. It describes the nature of a horse’s canter, a gait in which the animal’s “leading foreleg is the last to touch the ground before the moment of suspension” as the horse moves forward. The horse can canter by leading with either the right or the left foreleg, but as it rounds a curve, it usually leads with the inside foreleg. If the horse must change leads to put the inside foreleg first (the “flying change”), it can do so easily when it is running free. If the horse is being ridden, however, the rider’s added weight makes the shift more difficult, and the rider must teach the horse to compensate in order to carry out the change. Part 1 of the poem explains these matters in a matter-of-fact, third-person voice and without editorial comment except for the last sentence: “The aim of teaching a horse to move beneath you is to remind him how he moved when he was free.”

In part 2 Taylor changes form and voice to create a short (three five-line stanzas) series of statements in which a first-person speaker indirectly compares himself to the horse that must learn to do what once it did naturally. The images of this part recall the diagonal motion of the flying change made by the horse; they also suggest the idea of suspended motion (the moment of the change) and the idea of the tensions between one’s innate abilities and what one learns to do. Thus the first image is of a leaf turned “sideways in the wind,” which somehow moves the speaker “like a whipcrack” into a past where, rather like a horse in training, he once studied moves on a “barbered stretch of ground.” Later, he says, he taught himself to move away from those past skills, skills which he still possesses but “must outlive,” as if they are no longer useful to him. The act of cupping water in his hands reminds him of how age must affect him, making his hands “a sieve” instead of a cup. Time can never stand still, but—like the horse shifting its leading hoof and thus suspended for a moment in air—the speaker briefly feels “sustained in time.”

Forms and Devices

The division of this short poem into two parts strongly suggests its two voices, the “textbook” voice, which explains the riding maneuver, and the personal voice of one who finds himself also making a “flying change” and cherishing the brief moment of suspension above the earth. In the second part, Taylor uses five-line stanzas in iambic pentameter for the development of his speaker’s understanding of how the flying change applies to him. In each stanza, the first and fourth lines demonstrate slant rhyme, as do the second and fifth. The slant rhyme mutes the poem’s rhyme to such a degree that the reader may not notice the rhyme at first reading, but the nd sound of “wind” in the first line of part 2 echoes the nd of “ground” at the end of the fourth line, while “day” and “away” in lines 2 and 5 create true rhyme. Similar effects apply to the rhyme in the other stanzas.

The poem’s lines are also heavily enjambed so that their sense runs on from one line to the next. That effect is particularly noticeable between the three stanzas of part 2. In each case, Taylor withholds an important element of a sentence’s grammar until the first line of the following stanza. The effect is to make the reader see two layers of meaning in the lines. At the end of the first stanza, the speaker suggests that he taught himself to “drift away”; only in the first line of the following stanza does the reader understand that he drifted away not from the world in general but from something specific—skills which he still has.

The poem’s central metaphor lies in the description of the flying change itself, and in part 1 Taylor concentrates specifically two elements of that change. One is the moment of suspension as the horse shifts its lead foot; the other is the commentary included in the last sentence of that part. The whole point of teaching a horse to carry a rider is to teach it to maintain some of its natural movement under the “unnatural” burden of its rider, “to remind him how he moved when he was free.” In the second part, that metaphor is expanded to apply to the speaker, who also finds himself executing a flying change.

The poem’s form can now be seen to echo its content in that the second part, with its careful stanza organization, its rhyme and iambic pentameter, seems to suggest the schooling of both horses and humans to make artful things seem natural, things such as running while carrying a rider or writing a line of iambics. Indeed, the suspension of a line to balance its meaning between two stanzas seems to suggest the horse’s task of balancing the rider while shifting its weight in the canter.

In the thirteenth line of part 2, Taylor refers to “works and days,” an allusion to the Greek poet Hesiod (eighth century b.c.e.), who wrote a poem called “Works and Days” about the proper conduct of agricultural life—another instance of Taylor’s submerging elements of art in a poem which is partly about art and nature. In fact, much of the Flying Change collection deals with agricultural life.

Sources for Further Study

Library Journal. CX, December, 1985, p. 114.

The New York Times. CXXXIII, February 25, 1984, p. 10.

The New York Times. CXXXIII, April 15, 1984, p. 50.

The New York Times Book Review. XCI, May 4, 1986, p. 22.

Washingtonian. XIX, August, 1984, p. 90.