Kerrs Ass - Analysis

A borrowed donkey that becomes a passport

Kavanagh’s poem starts as a plain anecdote about rural work and ends as an argument about what memory can do: it can turn the most battered, local objects into a living world, even from the far side of exile. The opening sentence is already loaded with irony and need: We borrowed the loan of an ass, a double borrowing that hints at a community where everything is second-hand, dependent, and slightly precarious. The trip’s purpose is equally unromantic—butter to market in Dundalk—yet the poem treats the preparations with a tenderness that grows into something like prayer.

Even the itinerary carries a sting. They bring the donkey home the evening before market, but then comes exile that night in Mucker. The word exile is oversized for a farmer’s errand, and that mismatch matters: the poem wants us to feel how quickly ordinary rural life can tip into displacement, as if leaving home is always one night away.

The inventory of broken gear

The middle of the poem slows down to a careful unpacking of tools: harness, straw-stuffed straddle, broken breeching, bull-wire tied. This isn’t decorative detail; it’s a worldview. Everything is makeshift, repaired, tied on, endured. The poverty is practical and inventive, not sentimental, and Kavanagh refuses to tidy it up. Even the winkers are defective, had no choke-band, as if the whole outfit is slightly unsafe, held together by habit and improvisation.

At the same time, the list feels like an act of respect. To name each part is to admit it has a place in the story, and the story belongs to someone who knows the equipment intimately—someone whose hands have touched these objects and remembers their weight.

London enters: naming as a way home

The poem’s sharpest turn arrives with the sudden leap to Ealing Broadway, London Town. The speaker is no longer at the door in Mucker; he’s elsewhere, and the distance redefines the earlier details. In London, he says, I name their several names—as though the only way to keep that world from vanishing is to speak it into being. This is the poem’s core claim: language can function like return, not by romanticizing the past but by restoring its exact textures.

There’s a quiet tension here between what is lost and what can be remade. Exile removes the body from place, but it also forces a kind of precision. The broken breeching and bull-wire might have been unremarkable when they were simply in use; in London they become charged, because they are now evidence that the life once existed.

From cart parts to a waking god

The last lines make the poem’s ambition explicit: the naming continues Until a world comes to life. Not an image comes to mind, but a whole world reconstitutes itself—Morning, the silent bog, the wet air of Mucker fog. Out of the gear list rises something grander: the God of imagination waking. Kavanagh doesn’t claim imagination invents a better countryside; he claims it awakens what exile has threatened to erase.

And yet the poem won’t let that awakening become clean or heroic. The fog remains, and the bog is silent. The divine is not a churchly presence but a rural, weather-bound force—something that stirs inside the mind when it is pushed far from its source.

The poem’s hard question: what kind of holiness is this?

If imagination is a God, the poem also suggests it is a jealous one: it demands the specific. It doesn’t wake to vague nostalgia; it wakes to collar and reins, to the humiliating fact of a donkey borrowed on borrowed terms. The question the poem leaves hanging is uncomfortable and beautiful: if a world can be summoned by naming its broken equipment, does exile actually intensify belonging—or does it prove that belonging survives only as a private litany?