When she wrote the poem, Plath herself was learning to ride; her letters describe her excitement at the prospect of coming off the leading rein. Her horse was elderly and, according to a local friend, something of “a plodder”. The poem draws on an incident seven years earlier when she was bolted through the streets of Cambridge by a horse with the more prosaic name of Sam. But any narrative recreation of the experience that prompted the poem invariably shows Plath galloping alone across Dartmoor into a blazing sun – the feminist speaker-self of the poem.