33 pages • 1 hour read
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.
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:
No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time (Lines 26-30).
The dog gazes at the master, seemingly annoyed at the waste of time. The animal immersed itself in joyful moments while alive, as in his play in the surf of Isla Negra, while the human can do nothing except “env[y]” (Line 37) the dog. After this exposition, when we return to the dog’s death in the final stanza, we have the sense that the speaker is also mourning himself, lamenting his own metaphorical death, and his inability to have made as much out of life as his animal companion. The inversion of the master-pet relationship underscores just how much “A Dog Has Died” fits the definition of an elegy. The speaker ends the poem by saying, “So now he’s gone and I buried him, / and that’s all there is to it” (Lines 52-53). Though these last lines come off casually, a written stand-in for a physical shrug, the relationship on display in the poem nevertheless highlights various degrees of lament and suggests that there is certainly more to the burial and loss than what appears on the surface.
Materialism Versus Sensualism
At a literal level, the connection between Neruda’s speaker and the dog is a man and his pet. At a more metaphorical level, they are “friends” (Line 13). At the highest philosophical abstraction, Neruda frames this relationship as one between a staunch materialist and a playful sensualist. In philosophy, materialism (also known as physicalism) is the belief that all reality can be reduced to physical processes and their consequences. The speaker identifies himself with this philosophy when he declares himself an atheist: “I, the materialist, who never believed” (Line 7). In Neruda’s formulation, his materialism is dour and ungenerous: surrounded by “rusted old” garden detritus (Line 3) and unwilling to imagine “heaven in the sky / for any human being” (Lines 8-9).
On the other hand, the dog—though of course also a materialist by default—has the opposite perspective. Sensualism involves gathering truth from perception and sensation. The dog, for instance, lives in the moment, taking pleasure in the “voltage of the sea’s movement” (Line 42) and never ceasing to be “joyful, joyful, joyful” (Line 46). The dog also seems to be aware of time as a state worthy of pleasure and not contemplation. The dog “make[s] a vain person like me understand / that, being a dog, he was wasting time” (Lines 29-30), thus underscoring the dog’s sensualism as a worldview opposed to the “vain” (Line 29), attention-seeking speaker. And yet these very traits of vanity and attention-seeking suggest that the speaker is more of a sensualist than he thinks. Only when he contemplates the dog’s experience, however, does the speaker rise to flights of fancy like a heaven for dogs, his pet’s desire for “aloof” intimacy (Line 19), and the sensual descriptions of the dog frolicking on the island’s beach.
Such a contrast between human seriousness and animal pleasure is natural when a person hangs out with their pet. However, Neruda’s speaker expands his observations into a more philosophical vein, projecting a hope for himself onto the animal. The speaker does not enjoy his pet’s pleasure, but “envie[s]” it as the unachievable “pur[ity]” (Line 31) of a “shameless spirit” (Line 49). Notably these are abstract, immaterial terms, but terms that the speaker can only access through attribution. Never believing in a heaven for himself, but believing in a heaven for his dog, the speaker implies not only that his dog’s way of life and worldview is innately superior to his own, but that his perspective is a fundamentally flawed prison from which he can never escape: “only dogs know how to be happy” (Line 47).
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