A Dog Has Died

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1999

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Poem Analysis

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Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

"Ode to my Socks" by Pablo Neruda (1956)

The poetry collection Odes to Common Things contains 225 odes, many of them to quotidian objects. Like “A Dog Has Died,” the poem “Ode to my Socks” elevates a very quotidian object to something highly metaphorical, beautiful and “heavenly.” Reading these poems together gives us a better sense of the sentimentality and imagination with which Neruda processes daily life.

"Epitaph to a Dog" by Lord Byron (1808)

Lord Byron (1788-1824), an English poet, also wrote an elegy to a departed canine. Though written in a very different form (iambic pentameter couplets to Neruda’s free verse), Byron’s poem carries many of the same philosophical ideas as Neruda’s. Byron’s dog is “the firmest friend” with an “honest heart” and more honorable than a human, possessing “all the virtues of Man without his Vices.”

"Materialist" by Ken Babstock (2006)

In “Materialist,” Canadian poet Ken Babstock deals, like Neruda, with the consequences and limitations of an essentially materialist outlook on life. Like Neruda’s “A Dog Has Died,” Babstock’s free verse poem finds a strange unease in accepting a world limited to the things we can measure. It also hopes for, but is ultimately unable to hold, a more spiritual vision.

Further Literary Resources

"What We Can Learn from Neruda’s Poetry of Resistance" by Mark Eisner" (2018)

Mark Eisner’s 2018 article is a searching reflection on the lifelong political work of Pablo Neruda as interpreted through his poetry and biography. The article foregrounds Neruda as an individual constantly adapting his poetry to the social crises at hand, while never compromising his ethical or lyrical voice; Eisner calls on us to do the same.

"Mourning, Melancholy and the Millennium in Martin Jay, Julia Kristeva and Pablo Neruda" by Jill E. Jelgersma (1999)

This 1999 article in Literature and Theology provides an in-depth analysis of two poems by Pablo Neruda, “A Dog Has Died” and “Celebration,” with a special focus on the relationship of melancholy and mourning in these poems to Neruda’s understanding if his own imminent death. The article is a useful source of biographical material related to “A Dog Has Died,” including the name and breed of the actual dog described: a Chow named Chu-Tuh.

"Animal Elegies, Anti-Elegies, and Some Recent Transformations of a Genre" by John B. Vickery (2006)

In this 2006 article found in Genre, Vickery tracks the expansion of the elegy as a form within contemporary poetry. He focuses on the broadening of the subject of loss and grief to include not only death but also other forms of departure. He notes that generalizing the concept of grief also brings an expansion of the tones appropriate to elegy, which today can incorporate not only sorrow, but also irony and comedy. Vickers concludes that this development in poetry causes a formal interrogation of alternative modes of grieving and finds them insufficient to the elegiac form, leading back towards faith in “conventional elegiac authority” (30) in more recent contemporary poets.