The theme of wildness flows like a hard pulse through "How to Triumph Like a Girl" and the book that it opens, Bright Dead Things. Context from Ada Limón's life and consideration of the other poems in Bright Dead Things help reveal just how important "How to Triumph Like a Girl" is in foregrounding this theme.
Much of the book is darker than this poem, whose winning confidence sticks out amid Limón's poems which wrestle vulnerably with despair, loneliness, and loss. Bright Dead Things chronicles two shifts in Limón's life: her move to Kentucky and the protracted death of the stepmother who helped raise her. "How to Triumph Like a Girl," especially as the book's first poem, can be seen as the speaker steeling herself, drawing the wild triumphant strength of racehorses into her heart, precisely because that strength is tested again and again by the challenges recounted in other poems.
The poem "State Bird" begins, "Confession: I did not want to live here." The speaker then concedes that she would follow her lover anywhere, but it is clear in her book that Limón struggled with homesickness for northern California and finding her place in the unfamiliarity of Kentucky, where her husband moved to work in horse racing. Despite horses being connected to her husband's career more immediately than Ada's own, "How to Triumph Like a Girl" claims them as a symbol of the speaker's independence, one of the ways she finds kinship and meaning in her new state. They are undoubtedly feminist in "Triumph," an exemplar of the indomitable, untamed womanly spirit the speaker wants to have. But this wildness is not limited to gendered implications: in "The Wild Divine," the speaker remembers a stallion coming to investigate where she and her then-partner lay naked in the grass post-intercourse, and the horse appears as a sacred elder to the stoned young couple:
He seemed almost worthy of complete devotion.
We rubbed his long horse nose, his marble eyes turning
to take us all in, to inhale us, to accept our now-selves
and he was older, a wise, hoofed, grizzled equine elder
and I thought, this was what it was to be blessed––
to know a love that was beyond an owning, beyond
the body and its needs, but went straight from wild
thing to wild thing, approving of its wildness.
"The Wild Divine" picks up the themes established in "How to Triumph Like a Girl." These poems' horses reawaken the speaker to her innate wildness, her ineffable core that perseveres regardless of external circumstance. However, to embody this wildness requires faith: the speaker is "blessed" by "The Wild Divine" creature, and in "How to Triumph Like a Girl" she asks, "Don't you want to believe it?" It seems as if the speaker's faith in herself, like any religion, will extinguish without any believers. Limón is not a religious poet, but natural creatures, and especially horses in this book, serve a devotional purpose in reassuring the speaker's place in an uncertain world. As the speaker in Bright Dead Things accustoms herself to a new home, these animals suggest that wildness is also a home she carries within herself, and which is visible all around her.
"How to Triumph Like a Girl" implicitly wrestles with the concept of domestication, significant for a poet who had recently moved to a new home state for the sake of her partner. The poem's female racehorses, while technically domesticated, are only fiercer and more forceful for it: they "swagger," their hearts "giant with power." We could imagine that, to the speaker/poet, this is a sign that being domestic (living with her partner, for whom she has sacrificed her previous home) need not domesticate her – that is, end her wildness and independence. In her later collection The Carrying, Limón explores more fully in the poem "Wife" the sexist assumption that women enter into domestic servitude when they marry. In Bright Dead Things we see the speaker already bucking constantly against this idea, exploring the untamed parts of herself. In a rebellious scene from the poem "Service," the speaker finds herself in an auto yard badly needing a bathroom and takes it "as a challenge" when a female pit bull relieves herself:
That strong yellow stream seemed
to be saying, Girl, no one's going to tell me
when to take a leak, when to bow down,
when not to bite. So, right then, in the dim lights
of the strange garage, I lifted my skirt and pissed
like the hard bitch I was.
The dog in "Service," like the racehorses, is a domestic animal that refuses to let her domestication limit her freedoms. In this ending we see a callback to the brash defiance that concludes "How to Triumph Like a Girl," an animal reminding the speaker to believe in her own wildness. Moreover, the dog is marking her turf, perhaps encouraging the speaker that she can also claim this new landscape as hers.
In "Triumph," Limón specifies the heart as the site of her wildness, the "8-pound female horse heart" she imagines inside her. In the poem's last lines it is the heart itself, not the mind, that "knows, / it's going to come in first." This choice is significant: perhaps if she amplifies its animal power, her heart will be better equipped to handle emotions, the processing of which is her central task as a poet. In a poem later in the book, "Downhearted," loss and despair seem to have swamped the speaker, prompting a poignant callback:
The heart is so tired of beating
herself up, she wants to stop it still,
but also she wants the blood to return,
wants to bring in the thrill and wind of the ride,
the fast pull of life driving underneath her.
What the heart wants? The heart wants
her horses back.
"Downhearted" opens with news of six horses dying in a tractor-trailer fire, and the speaker admits this is "just one on a long recent list" of losses. The line break at "so tired of beating" implies a faltering will to live. Here, readers are reminded of the speaker's heart described as a "huge beating genius machine" in "How to Triumph Like a Girl," and "Downhearted" is doubly powerful for the contrast. The horses represent perseverance and strength: in "Triumph," the speaker boldly absorbs these attributes into her own heart. In "Downhearted," it is merely an aching human heart, longing to regain the horses' wild spirit. To maintain this strength, and her belief in it, is not easy: all the more reason why "How to Triumph Like a Girl" sees the speaker (and reader) hoarding strength to face hardships in the rest of the book.
Lastly, the theme of wildness fortifies the speaker to face not just despair, but human mortality. In the sequence of poems concerning her stepmother's death, there are recurring images of the body as machinery: "That machine-body gone harsh / in its prolonging" (from "Relentless"), the dying woman letting "the machine / of survival break down" (from "The Riveter"). These cold, inhuman images of death run contrary to the swaggering horses and dogs with whom the speaker repeatedly identifies herself. The fear of the body as a machine, a machine that will one day break, helps explain one of the strangest lines in "How to Triumph Like a Girl," line 16: "the huge beating genius machine." The word "machine" is odd in a poem about horses, foreshadowing the death that looms later in the book. In this line, the speaker fuses the images of body-as-animal and body-as-machine. The effect is ambiguous: perhaps by amplifying the wildness of her body, the speaker imbues extra life into it. Or perhaps this line is a hidden acknowledgment that even her "huge beating" heart will inevitably pass away like Limón's mother figure—though this battle cry of a poem does not openly leave room for this kind of grief.
Read in the context of Bright Dead Things, "How to Triumph Like a Girl" is even more significant for how it introduces the motifs of hearts and animal and machine bodies that reverberate through the book and lend meaning to the heavy topics in its poems.
