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 him to conjure “a heaven I’ll never enter. / Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom” (Lines 10-11) 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 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.