levelheaded: The Old Dog’s Lament

Contrary to the widely held and perhaps ego-driven belief that humans consciously and forcibly bred wolves into the dogs we know today, one recent theory on their evolution suggests dogs essentially tricked humans into caring for them by gradually taming themselves until, over tens of thousands of years, scraps thrown to the outskirts of nomadic hunting camps transformed into a multi-billion dollar industry of chew toys and premium dog foods. In brief, the canine human relationship developed mutually as opposed to unilaterally at the hands of humans. We like this theory because it deepens the relationship between man and dog, and it gives us a better excuse for our blubbering at the end of Old Yeller.

We also like this theory because it supports our notion that a poem about dogs is always a poem about humans. At the end of this poem’s first stanza, the speaker’s innocence is wrapped up in a moment of child-like egotism: “The turtle, / even the heron stopped to hear / my song! I was a blithe boy!” Though a human voice has been imposed on the poem’s canine speaker, the poet’s anthropomorphizing cuts two ways. Certainly, the poet personifies the dog, but she does so (and we respond) because dogs have uniquely survived on their ability to elicit a response from people.

Personification might seem like one of the simplest, flattest tools in the literary toolkit. But it can be used subtly to put human experience in high relief. Later the speaker relates how he met and mated with “the yellow bitch with / the feral smell, exhorting voice.” The latter half of that phrase—“the feral smell, exhorting voice”—is an especially interesting conflation of human and animal response. Literally, these are the thoughts of the old dog, but even as we step back and consider a human speaker, these smells and moans seem to point to an instinctual, almost animal reaction. The poet equates the dog’s sexual experience with a man’s, presenting the two as equally animalistic.

Domestic animals in particular are fodder for poems because we watch their entire life cycle. A dog’s movement from puppyhood to death is long enough that we become deeply attached but short enough that we vividly experience and recall the change from “blithe boy” to “sorrow-song” with the sudden, intense knowledge that humans experience the same thing on a marginally larger scale. Perhaps this is why it’s so affecting when the second section of the poem moves starkly away from sexual or childish ecstasy into the territory of loss. Remove a couple parentheticals from the second section’s first sentence, and we have “Even after […] her smell still lay, heavy, on the hay.” By the time the tense shift in the final stanza clarifies the poem’s bittersweet reminiscence of youth, the “she” in the poem is long gone. It’s as if the entire poem is an echo—not unlike “the parallel / report from the ridge-scraped barn, / glaciated pond.”

We don’t have to work too hard to place dog-specific phrases like “jaw-dragged,” “her fur there, dead, grayed,” or “her bark, joy-struck eyes, tail thrilling” along a spectrum of human emotion because we have an intuitive, almost primal instinct for these canine signifiers. The unique image of a “tail thrilling” or gray fur amid “sere stems” make the sense of loss all the more dramatic. This is a deeply human poem. That said, there’s no reason a deeply dog poem wouldn’t be as affecting and bittersweet.

– The Editors