The Crowds Cheered As Gloom Galloped Away

Martha Harvey’s poem tells the story of tiny ponies who seem to cure sadness. It opens by telling us that a month’s supply of pills came with six small ponies, which are then played with by children and eventually left to their own devices. People seem to refer to the ponies manifestations of gloom. The line “people would smile & say, ‘This would have been an awful month for me,’ pointing to the glossy palomino trotting around their ankles” makes me think that the stronger and prettier the ponies look, the worse the sadness is. But the people don’t feel sadness if they’ve had anything to do with ponies and pills. The poem seems to suggest that misery is an attractive thing to the masses, and the more depressing something is, the more people will cheer for it. I can’t help but relate this to nonfiction novels, many of which tell the true hardships of the writer. You don’t read much nonfiction that doesn’t deal with some sort of tragedy or seemingly impossible circumstance. People do tend to be attracted to the sorrow of others, for whatever reason.

Because this piece reads so much like a story, and because it is formatted as one long paragraph, I wonder what makes it a poem. It seems more like poetic fiction to me, and I can’t think of how to re-format it without drastically changing the sentence structure. Generally, I like for poems to appear as poems, and while I enjoyed reading this, I don’t understand why it is written the way it is.


~Nicole Bartow