Blue Arab

transformation rhymed verse dreamlike

Blue Arab - meaning Summary

Ephemeral Equine Mirage

Judith Wright's 'Blue Arab' presents a concentrated image of an exotic stallion that blurs sea, sky and desert. The poem follows the horse's lively motion across a hill, linking it to breakers, storms and Arabian dunes. It shifts into a visionary figure—centaur-like, sun-catching, and pursued by wind—whose attraction is partly illusion: he forgets his mares for a phantom gallop and the hill becomes a heat-mirage. The poem explores desire, transformation and ephemerality.

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The small blue Arab stallion dances on the hill like a glancing breaker, like a storm rearing in the sky, In his prick-ears,the wind, that wanderer and spy, sings of the dunes of Arabia, lion-coloured still. The small blue stallion poses like a centaur-god, netting the sun in his sea-spray mane, forgetting his stalwart mares for a phantom galloping unshod; changing for a heat-mirage his tall and velvet hill.