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Pablo NerudaA Dog Has Died
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
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
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
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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By Pablo Neruda
