A traveller too mean to pay for his horse's stabling lets the animal graze in a neighbour's meadow. The landowner appears, the thief orders the horse to run for it, and the horse, to everyone's surprise, answers back. It would rather stand its ground than give up a good dinner for a master who has only ever worked it hard. The two-line moral that closes the poem draws the lesson out: "Urge no Man to despair," because someone with nothing left to lose may strike back. The poem reads like a fable, with a talking animal and a lesson at the end. Its sympathy lies clearly with the horse.
The construction is neat and bouncy. Every stanza has six lines and only two rhyme sounds, in the pattern aabaab. The first, second, fourth and fifth lines run to four beats, while the third and sixth shrink to three. Those short lines work like the snap of a whip. They carry the punchlines: "For Forage all the Night" exposes the master's stinginess, "Or half so well had far'd" shows how rare the horse's luck is, and "And to the Death wou'd ride?" turns a comic scene sharply serious. The tight, nursery-rhyme music keeps the tone light, which makes the horse's grievances land harder when they arrive. The closing couplet switches to longer, five-beat lines, so the moral stands apart from the story like a sign at the end of a path.
Finch's word choices sort the characters quickly. The master is a "sordid Churl" and later a "Clown", both blunt words for a low, grasping man. His crime is "Purloining", a grand Latinate verb for a very petty theft, and the mismatch is funny. The irony deepens when the thief, caught out, becomes the one who "do's command" the horse to flee. He is the guilty party, yet he expects the animal to pay the price. The horse is "poor Bayard", a stock name for a horse, and the adjective tips the narrator's sympathy in his favour.
Sound does a lot of work too. When the unloaded horse begins to "neigh, and frisk, and feed", the three verbs and their loose, repeated "and" are almost skipping. Compare the horse's description of his working life: "Who to my Back hard Burdens fit". The hard consonants (*Back*, *hard*, *Burdens*) make the line sound heavy, and the weight is felt in the mouth.
The horse's speech is the best part. "Hunger quick'ning up his Wit" is a sharp phrase, and the next line, "Grass being sweeter than the Bit", plays on two mouth-words. The first stanza had "a Bite" of food, and now there is the metal bit of the bridle. The horse sets the pleasures and punishments of his life against each other and sees which is better. His reasoning is almost legal. If he runs, he is gone and the master keeps riding him to death. If he stays and is "seiz'd upon forbidden Ground", he can only be treated "ill", and he already is. Even the parenthesis "(Or did Mankind this Field surround)" has a comic grandeur, picturing one horse unimpressed by the whole human race. Since every possible rider would treat him the same, he owes loyalty to no one.
The ending is cleverer than it first looks. The moral speaks to the powerful, yet in the story the horse never actually hits anyone. His resistance is only stubborn stillness, "I'll on this Spot stand still". The "Counterblow" is a possibility, not an event. The warning therefore works as a threat held in reserve: the powerless have more leverage than their masters assume, and they discover it when treated as if they have nothing to lose. Judging by the poem, the master's real mistake is not stealing hay but taking the horse's service for granted.
That compactness is what makes the poem worth reading. In thirty-odd lines it gives a thief, a victim, a sharp-tongued animal and a moral that applies to any relationship between those who command and those who carry the load. It is also surprisingly funny. The horse is allowed to win the argument.