A Dog Has Died Summary and Analysis PDF

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A Dog Has Died Summary and Analysis...

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Overview “Un perro ha muerto” (English title: “A Dog Has Died”) is a free verse poem originally written in Spanish by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda upon the death of his dog. The poem was among the last Neruda wrote before his death in 1973, and was published posthumously in the volume Jardin del invierno (“Winter Garden”) in 1974. The overall style and tone of the poem is in line with Neruda’s later work, when the Nobel-Prize winning surrealist and political poet had tempered his style towards a more conversational tone and quotidian subject matter. “A Dog Has Died” deals with the speaker’s grief over the lost pet, and honors the pet’s life via favorable comparison of the animal’s indomitable personality and joie-de-vivre to the master’s own dour, somewhat hopeless existence. As a commemoration of a dead companion, the poem is an elegy—a genre of poetry composed to lament and pay tribute to the dead. Neruda’s choice to eulogize a dead animal might appear strange—as a witness to the Spanish Civil War and a prominent Chilean diplomat, Neruda knew many heroic individuals (see Contextual Analysis), but did not write elegies for them. However, this purposeful omission of human achievement helps the reader to interpret the poem. Like Neruda’s other famous poems in honor of daily life and objects (see Odes to Common Things in Further Reading), this poem has deep respect for the simple, honest life of an animal, calling human morality into question like much of Neruda’s political poetry. Written when the poet understood his own death to be imminent, the poem can also be read metonymically. Metonymy is a literary device in which the name or description of one object is replaced by that of another closely linked object. In this case, the elegiac tone could well be the poet’s projected mourning of himself, and quiet sense of regret over a life perhaps not lived to its absolute fullest. Poet Biography Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile. A Chilean diplomat and poet awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971, Neruda was one of the most prominent Latin American poets of the 20th century. His second book of poems, Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song, is the best-selling book of poetry in Spanish.

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Neruda’s mother died shortly after his birth, at which time the family moved to the town of Temuco, where his father remarried. Neruda flourished as a poet early in life. By age 16, he had adopted the pseudonym Pablo Neruda, likely as a response to his father’s discouragement of his writing. By 1923, Neruda had published his first work, Book of Twilights. Twenty Love Poems, which followed shortly thereafter, was critically acclaimed but controversial for its high degree of eroticism. In 1926, out of financial necessity, Neruda took a diplomatic position as an honorary consul stationed in South Asia. Neruda identified strongly with South Asian peoples, whom he saw as downtrodden by colonial rule. He wrote prolifically during this period, releasing several collections and transitioning from an earlier symbolist and lyrical style to a more densely experimental and surrealistic framework. In 1932, Neruda was sent as consul to Madrid, Spain, where, he supported communism, which was favored by the literary community. In 1936 the political unrest brewing throughout Spain erupted in the Spanish Civil War. Neruda’s poetic style shifted again, towards a more direct and easily interpretable diction honoring Latin American history, culture, and sovereignty. Over the course of the war, Neruda travelled around Spain and surrounding countries, gathering support for the Spanish Republicans. In 1930, Neruda married Marijke Vogelzang, who gave birth to their daughter Malva Reyes in 1935. After he and Marijke divorced, he married Delia del Carril. In 1943, at age nine, Malva died of tuberculosis. After a short-lived stint as a Senator and official member of the Communist party, in 1948 Neruda was exiled from Chile for writing an open letter denouncing Present Gabriel González Videla’s increasingly right-wing policies. In 1952, after the political situation had cooled, Neruda returned to Chile and built a house on the small sea-facing commune of Isla Negra. Now quite wealthy, Neruda traveled extensively and continued to compose poetry. Neruda was appointed the Chilean ambassador to France in 1969, and received the Nobel Prize in 1970. He died of cancer in 1973. Poem Text Neruda, Pablo. “A Dog Has Died.” Translated by Alfred Yankauer. Feb 1999. Poetry Foundation. Summary

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“A Dog has Died” commences with a three-line stanza stating the poem’s core plot: The speaker’s dog has died and been buried “in the garden / next to a rusted old machine” (Lines 2-3). In the second stanza, the speaker notes that one day he will “join him right there” (Line 4) in the garden. He states that though he does not believe in heaven, he does believe in “a heaven I’ll never enter […] a heaven for all dogdom” (Line 11) where his dog waits for his arrival. The third stanza describes the speaker’s relationship with his dog: The animal was a “companion” (Line 15), but not an equal or a subordinate one. Rather, the dog’s friendship was similar to the friendship of a “star, aloof, / with no more intimacy than was called for” (Lines 19-20). He notes that unlike other dogs, his dog never climbs on his clothes or humps his knee. The fourth stanza explores the speaker’s understanding of the dog’s gaze. This gaze expresses the dog’s annoyance at wasting his time on his owner, since the dog is such a much purer being. In the fifth stanza, the speaker describes watching the dog play in the surf of Isla Negra with envy. While the dog is carefree and full of joy, the speaker himself cannot access this uncomplicated joy. The sixth stanza elaborates that dogs feel happiness without self consciousness or guilt, “as only dogs know how to be happy / with only the autonomy / of their shameless spirit” (Lines 48-49). The seventh and eighth stanzas form two couplets. The seventh stanza rues that there is no way to say goodbye to the dog, because the speaker and the dog have never lied to one another. In the eighth, the speaker goes back to the matter-of-factness of the first stanza, averring once more that his dog is dead and he has buried him, “and that’s all there is to it” (Line 53).

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Poem Analysis Analysis: “A Dog Has Died” Neruda’s poem is written in free verse, a metrical form characterized by its lack of a consistent meter or poetic form. The poem is comprised of eight stanzas of varied line lengths with no overarching rhyme scheme. The poem is an elegy: A poem written upon the death of someone in order to honor or commemorate them. The poem’s metrical form and genre are important aspects of how it must be interpreted. Free verse arose in Modernist poetry in the early 1920s as a reaction to the death and destruction of World War I. Its formlessness comes from poets no longer believe that traditional literary styles had the capacity to express deep truths about the human experience. Although Neruda does not outwardly express distrust for traditional forms, this dissatisfaction with human formality is encoded in the poem’s reverence for the lifestyle and personality of his pet. In the first lines, Neruda gives a simple declarative statement that his dog has died and has been buried. The periods and line-break further the no-nonsense tone of this statement. Here, encapsulated in the stanza break, is the end of the dog’s life: The poem enacts his death as an abrupt cutoff. Now that the creature’s body is no longer living, its location “next to a rusted old machine” (Lines 1-3) foreshadows the poet’s atheism (the dog’s body is a machine that can no longer be used, just like the rusted mechanism it is buried near) and the materialism the poet will claim as his orienting philosophy. The second stanza dwells on the material being of the dog, conjured in Neruda’s description of the memorable aspects of the dog’s personality and body: “his shaggy coat / his bad manners and his cold nose […] his fan-like tail” (Lines 5-6, 13). The stanza also makes a massive ontological leap, moving from discussion of his own atheism and materialism (here, a belief that there is no such thing as the soul—that bodies are just composed of material rather than of supernatural substance) to the hope that the dog might be in a special, unreachable kind of heaven. The speaker makes his religious beliefs—or lack thereof—clear in the stanza’s initial line, “Someday I’ll join him right there” (Line 4). The “there” is not heaven— rather, it is the dog’s grave in the garden next to the rusted old machine. The speaker does not believe in heaven for people: “I, the materialist, who never believed / in any promised heaven in the sky / for any human being” (Lines 7-8). However, his grief over his dog forces

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him to conjure “a heaven I’ll never enter. / Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom” (Lines 1011) as a way to comfort himself. The third stanza deepens the emotional connection between the speaker and the poet. The dog is his “companion” (Line 15). The poem elevates the death of the dog, treating it like the death of a close friend. Theirs was not a relationship between an animal and its master, but a “friendship” (Line 13) which was “never servile” (Line 16); rather, they were sometimes “aloof, / with no more intimacy that was called for” (Lines 19-20). The stoic self-assurance of a relationship with boundaries gets a jokey refrain when Neruda writes that his dog always maintained composure and “never rubbed up against my knee / like other dogs obsessed with sex” (Lines 24-25). The second and third stanzas at times describe the dog not as the poet’s equal, but as his existential superior: The dog, not the man, is “aloof”; the dog, not the man, enters heaven. The fourth stanza continues to elevate the dog over the speaker, describing the experience of the speaker feeling his dog gaze at him with eyes “so much purer” (Line 31) than his own. He anthropomorphizes the dog as feeling like looking the poet is “wasting time” (Line 30), a kindly but scornful observer of the speaker’s “vain” (Line 29) life. The fifth stanza is the emotional climax of the poem, where the speaker looks back on a moment spent with this creature that is full of life. The poem’s setting changes from the mournful garden to “the shores of the sea / in the lonely winter of Isla Negra” (Lines 38-39) where the dog leaps in and out of the ocean like a “golden-tail[ed]” sea-sprite (Line 44). Once again, the dog is living his life to the fullest while the speaker can only watch jealously. The speaker envies the dog’s enthusiasm and his ability to live in the moment, wishes he could transcend his self-awareness to live this way. The poem’s full argument becomes clear in Stanza 6: Only dogs understand true joy because they can experience it without the mediation of shame, guilt, or embarrassment. The dog experiences pleasure as “joyful, joyful, joyful” (Line 46)—happy “as only dogs know how to be happy” (Line 47)—because the dog’s happiness is linked to his “autonomy” and “shameless[ness]” (Lines 48-49). The speaker rues that people cannot ever feel this kind of pure emotion, afraid of the judgment they will face—from themselves, from society, from religion—should they actually live with dog levels of joy and wonder. The pet has now been fully elevated over his master: The dog is a wise sage fully in control of his own life, an “autonomous” being offering an example of how to find happiness. The speaker, on the other

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hand, is full of shame and grief, locked into the rules of the material and social worlds, submissive to his worldview, his fears, and the past. Just as the poem’s middle stanzas swelled into over 10 lines each, now they rapidly dwindled again: The sixth stanza is only 4 lines long, while stanzas seven and eight decrease again to two. We get the sense here that the speaker is reclaiming control of his emotional and philosophical outburst and returning to his material world. Notably, this return brings back the limited human world and its lack of access to the dog or his spirit: “There are no good byes for my dog who has died” (Line 50). In the final couplet, the speaker fully returns to the materialism which initiated the poem. The last stanza is nearly identical in content to the first. This parallelism (see Literary Devices) signals that the journey is over: “That’s all there is to it” (Line 53). This is a strongly materialist line, declaring that there is nothing after death. It also is deeply tragic: The speaker has lost something he can never have again.

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Contextual Analysis Biographical Context In analysis of poetry, it is typical to speak of a relationship between the poet and the reader interrupted by the intermediary figure of “the speaker,” an imagined character who voices the poem. Even though it might make sense to assume that the poet is in fact the poem’s narrator, or even though the poet shares similarities with the speaker or narrator of the poem, it’s routinely frowned upon to automatically assert that poet and speaker are one and the same. Some poems, however, are confessional by nature. In the case of “A Dog Has Died,” the poet and speaker are very closely analogous. Written in the poet’s later years, the poem is explicitly set on Neruda’s home of Isla Negra and commemorates a dog that actually did die around the time of this poem’s composition. Furthermore, like Neruda himself proclaimed to be, the speaker is an atheist: “I, the materialist, who never believed / in any promised heaven” (Lines 7-8). The kinship of the speaker and the poet has overtones for the interpretation of the poem within the context of Neruda’s life. Neruda wrote the poem after participating in the Spanish Civil War. During the war and in the years following, Neruda witnessed the corruption of the Chilean government and the execution of his close friend, activist and fellow poet Federico García Lorca. The poem also follows the 1943 death of Neruda’s daughter. It might seem strange that instead of eulogizing the many heroic figures in his life, Neruda wrote an elegy for a nameless dog. However, the poem is not Neruda’s choice to honor a pet instead of human companions. Rather, it is a cohesive expression of a lifetime of grief coalescing in a singular, relatively insignificant departure. As an expression of grief finally bubbling over, the elevation of the pet to a sage of autonomous and joyous living makes much more sense: The dog stands in for all those whom Neruda mourns and has had to say goodbye to—not least of whom is Neruda himself. Neruda wrote the poem when his death by cancer was imminent—a fact alluded to early in the poem, when the speaker mentions joining his dog in the garden where he is buried (Line 4). Understanding this context transforms the envy of the pet’s joyfulness into a melancholic statement of the poet’s regret and fear that he has not lived his life to the fullest.

Literary Context

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In ancient Greek poetry, the elegy was a metrical form comprised of elegiac couplets. These couplets alternated lines of dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter. Famous examples include the love poems of Ovid and others by Catullus (early Greek and Latin examples lose their original metered structure in translation). However, since the 16th century (and as Neruda uses it), the term has described a poem of lamenting, one with a reflective tone that commemorates a dead individual—typically, a closely held loved one or a prominent cultural figure. Confusion can sometimes arise due to forms similar in theme, including the epitaph, eulogy, and ode. The ode is a form of exaltation, while epitaphs are traditionally pithy. Eulogies, though reflective, appear in formal prose. Elegies also differ in composition. Elegies typically include lament, praise, and solace as parts of a whole. Famous elegies include John Milton’s “Lycidas,” Walt Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain,” and Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” “A Dog Has Died” fits the definition of a modern elegy. Neruda laments his loss, even if he tempers the tone:

Ai, I’ll not speak of sadness here on earth, of having lost a companion who was never servile (Lines 14-16).

Though Neruda says he won’t give in to sadness by lamenting his loss or talking about his sadness, he’s writing a poem about that very loss, thus lamenting it through the act of commemoration. He also praises his dog later in the poem:

No, my dog used to gaze at me, paying me the attention I need, ……………………………………………... but, with those eyes so much purer than mine, he’d keep on gazing at me

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with a look that reserved for me alone all his sweet and shaggy life, always near me, never troubling me, and asking nothing (Lines 26-27, 31-36).

Neruda also infuses solace throughout the poem. One of the most notable moments appears early on when he says that though he has buried his dog in the garden, “Some day I’ll join him right there” (Line 4). Neruda’s choice to write an elegy for his dog instead of a human loved might seem strange, but it is not unheard of. During the 20th century, poets massively expanded possible tones and subjects for elegies (see Vickery’s article in Further Reading). Furthermore, literature often celebrates human connection to animals, particularly dogs—see for instance, the death scene of Odysseus’s dog Argos in Book 17 of Homer’s Odyssey, or Lord Byron’s elegy for his canine companion (see Further Reading). At the same time, Neruda’s choice to write a free verse elegy for his dog, and not a cultural figure, expresses more than his love for the animal. We could read the poem as a critique of the elegy itself—a refutation of the idea that a highly formal poem could ever truly express grief. This interpretation connects to one of the core motifs of the poem: The inability of humans to either fully experience or understand the majesty of life. Dogs live life better than humans do; it is therefore dogs that deserve to be commemorated more than humans.

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Themes Inverting of the Master-Pet Relationship “A Dog Has Died” plays with the concept of the master-pet relationship. With the poem’s first word, “My” (Line 1), the speaker claims ownership over the dog he will eulogize. This ownership fits the traditional narrative of master-pet relationships. However, as the poem progresses, this clear relationship of master and pet quickly dissolves into other forms of pairing. In the second stanza, Neruda replaces the assumed relation of master and pet with one of “friendship” (Lines 13, 19), companionship, and the moral superiority of the dog over the human. Again, friendship and companionship are often synonymous with master-pet relationships. Dogs are “companions,” man’s best friend,” etc. The moral superiority, however, effectively flips the relationship between master and pet by positing not only a morality inherent in a dog but a superior morality. We see this inversion of the master-pet relationship in the suggestion that while the speaker has never needed to imagine a heaven for the people he has lost, he now needs to picture an all-dog heaven to comfort himself after the dog’s death:

I believe in a heaven I’ll never enter. Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom where my dog waits for my arrival waving his fan-like tail in friendship (Lines 10-13).

The need to envision this “dogdom” also implies that the dog has led a morally upstanding life while people do not—this is why humans do not warrant entry to paradise while pets do. The “friendship” and “companion[ship]” (Line 15) of the second stanza deepen as the speaker’s dog is more and more anthropomorphized (see Literary Devices) throughout the next few stanzas. The dog becomes an “aloof” friend (Line 19), distant, cold, and bright, like a star. Instead of the master participating in a world the pet does not fully understand, this poem flips the situation so that it is the dog that fully lives, transcending the human:

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