“The sea became a wildcat now, and the galleon her prey. She stalked the ship and drove her off course.”

Marguerite Henry uses extended metaphors throughout the book to develop The Natural World Versus the Human-Made World. In this scene, the wildcat sea eventually rolls the ship over, casts it against the rocks, and breaks it open. This serves as exposition for the novel’s events, explaining how horses came to inhabit the island; it also associates them with the natural elements.

“The ponies were exhausted, and their coats were heavy with water, but they were free, free, free!”

After being held in the dark belly of the Spanish galleon, the ponies cannot believe their luck when they wade onto the shore of Assateague. This phrase helps establish Assateague as a horse’s paradise, full of grass and places to run and free from humans or predators.

“Not a human being anywhere. Only grass. And sea. And sky. And the wind.”

From the time the horses first arrived until the modern day, humans have never established a permanent settlement on Assateague. In the book, this allows the horses to become fully wild within just a few generations. The natural elements—grass, sea, sky, and wind, here emphasized through Henry’s use of short sentence fragments and the repetition of “and”—contrast with the human world but are closely aligned with the main horse characters.