Divided Destinies - Analysis

A jealous daydream disguised as a joke

The poem’s central move is a confession: beneath the speaker’s amused superiority sits a real envy of the animal’s unaccountable freedom. It begins in idle curiosity—watching an artless Bandar dancing upon a pine—but that curiosity quickly turns inward. The speaker slept the sleep of idleness and dreams the monkey speaks, which signals that what follows is less natural history than a projection: the Bandar becomes a mouthpiece for everything the speaker is tired of in his own life.

The tone is lightly comic—Kipling gives us a mangy monkey delivering social criticism—but the comedy keeps slipping toward something more sour. The speaker laughs, then winces, because the monkey’s insults land where the speaker actually lives.

The Bandar’s freedom is built out of refusals

In the dream, the Bandar defines himself by what he doesn’t do: no Ranken’s monthly bills, no little cards for little drinks at Mess, no trousers or coats. This is not a pastoral paradise; it’s a satire of a very specific kind of human routine—shopping, accounting, social obligation—compressed into names of shops and rituals. Even the address O man of many clothes! reduces the human being to wardrobe and status, as if the speaker’s identity has been replaced by the stuff that signals it.

The Bandar’s bragging also insists on a life without comparison. He follow[s] no man’s carriage, owns no ponies, drives no tall-wheeled traps. The animal’s dignity, such as it is, comes from being outside the whole system of display.

Freedom isn’t innocence: it’s theft, itch, and hunger

Yet the poem refuses to make the Bandar purely noble. His independence includes petty criminality—I steal the bunnia’s grain—and is justified by a blunt natural logic: he is fat and I am spare. That line is funny, but it also exposes a harsher ethic than the speaker’s world pretends to run on. The Bandar’s body tells the truth: he’s very mangy, his face very red, always scratching with energy. Even his big final gesture—Here he pouched my breakfast-roll—turns philosophical boasting into simple appetite.

This is the key tension: the speaker envies “freedom,” but the poem keeps showing that the monkey’s freedom is inseparable from discomfort, opportunism, and need. The Bandar is unburdened by bills, yes, but he is also burdened by fleas.

Where the speaker truly flinches

The Bandar’s most revealing claim isn’t about money; it’s about power. He says he quarrels with his wife at home, but Mrs. B. has grasped the fact I am her only lord. The line is tossed off as part of the monkey’s swagger, yet it mirrors the speaker’s own world of rank and dominance—only made embarrassingly plain. The Bandar mocks human futile fopperies, but he shares the same impulse to declare mastery, to reduce relationship to rule.

So the speaker’s longing—how my spirit cried / To be an artless Bandar loose—isn’t just a wish to escape clothes and cards. It’s also a wish to step outside judgment, to live without being measured, even by the self.

Inscrutable Decree: the turn from desire to resignation

The poem’s turn comes when the speaker answers the dream. Instead of arguing, he invokes inscrutable Decree: a cosmic bureaucracy that assigns roles. The couplet gleesome fleasome Thou versus wretched Me is playful, but it lands like surrender. He blesses the monkey—Depart in peace, my brother—while admitting, almost with shame, that a mortal wished to change his lot.

The final insight is bleakly modest: the speaker can imagine switching lives, but imagination is all he gets. The Bandar can steal the breakfast-roll; the man can only translate that theft into a poem and call it fate. The humor remains, but now it feels like the thin crust over a real complaint: some creatures get to live unexamined, and some are condemned to self-consciousness, bills, and the longing to be otherwise.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

When the speaker calls the Bandar my brother, is it tenderness—or an attempt to soften the humiliation of being despised by a mangy thief? The monkey’s contempt, I pity and despise you!, stings because it comes from below, from the creature the speaker assumed he outranked. The poem dares the reader to ask which is worse: to be flea-bitten and free, or comfortable and quietly owned by little cards, monthly bills, and the need to keep up appearances.