The Donkey by P.R. Kaikini, is a beautiful portrait of an animal which had been in use in the past and it was a necessity for us in fact as it used to render us a great service. But it too had a life of own. None liked to peep into the poor self.  Who would like to hear its story?

How had it been our times? How had been our days? This too has a relevance of own to know. The donkey had some job to do as we required its services. But there came a time when they got unemployed, turned they jobless and they were left and abandoned, letting to die in harness. Philip Larkin in his poem At Grass says about the racehorses counting their days bereft of glory. But the poet here talks about the woes of the poor animal. The poem reminds us of the ox story. As an animal poem it also reminds us of D.H. Lawrence and his other poems.

The donkey wanders it over the wild countryside, a stock character whose feet keep treading the ground. If we look into its ancestral lineage, the animal cannot be belittled.

Now it trudges as the beast of burden carrying the cartloads on its back and the master keeps flogging as for to extract its services. Now say you, how is it its life! How long will it keep serving?

Sometimes it seems to be thinking of its heyday, the days of lost glory when the kings and commanders talked of possessing as for pride and glory. When it is whipped, it repents for having been assigned with a burdensome job, from which there is no relief, it repents for a cursed lot it has got.

The bells and the flutter of leaves are the things of lost glory. Only in dreams it can think of being adorned and stoked and potentially talking with the winds with a great flying spirit, the donkey taking a circuit of the area. In the tombstone area it can be seen loitering.

To annotate the poem is to destroy the intrinsic meaning of the poem. We do not see them around us now is a fact.

He wanders over the wild countryside
A reckless rake,
His feet proudly treading
The snug familiar ground.

Sometimes he remembers
And struts, remembering his ancestral glory
Upon the cold still hill
Under whose shady depths rests perchance
an unknown king or clown.

Sometimes, he forgets
And lingers and loiters long
Over the unenchanted unbounded plain
The holy sepulchre of Akbars and Alexanders

Often he dreams —
And hears the bells and the flutter of leaves,
Sees in a flash
The sumptuous splendour of his buried days.

Oftener he wakes, the wretch —
And carries sand and stone,
wood and water
man and woman.
Snarling under the relentless whip
He swears as he trudges along the ever-winding way
He curses, curses all the way.