By Melanie Mock And when we are certain of sorrow in store, Why do we always arrange for more? Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware Of giving your heart to a dog to tear. --Rudyard Kipling, "The Power of the Dog" A poet once told me it was impossible to write profoundly about a dead dog. During a conversation in which he lamented the untimely demise of a whippet named Lark, who had broken her back when jumping off the couch, I had suggested he write a poem about his sorrow. But the man who had written candidly about sex and longing and love and war told me crafting a poem about a dead dog was beyond him-beyond any poet, really. Even the best writer, he said, is weakened by a mawkish sentiment for his own canine corpse. Something there is about a dead dog that inspires poetry, though. For throughout the history of western literature, writers have penned odes to dead Spaniels and Irish Hounds and Poodles and mutts. One almost wonders if Homer's songs included an elegy to the dead dog a Greek hero buried somewhere during his epic journey. To a great extent, the poetry of the dead dog marks the course taken by western literature; Robert Burns's elegy to his lap dog Echo reflects the literary tastes of the sixteen century as much as William Wordsworth's "Idyllium" to his dog does Romanticism. During the Great War, trench poets wrote not only about warfare but also about their dead trench dogs; contemporary poets, too, have eulogized dead dogs, trying-of course-to sustain a postmodern guise of detachment. Yet despite the characteristics that tie dead dog poetry to a certain time or place, in any dead dog poem one element remains strikingly clear: the writer really, really liked his dog. And that dog is now dead. I heard my first dead dog poem in a college philosophy course. The professor, close to retirement, decided on the class's final day to read some poetry he had written; no hobby poet, the professor had already published several collections of his work. The poem he shared, though, was titled "The Old Dog's Dead," a maudlin lament of his dear companion's passing. Choking over his own lines, the professor read passionately about the old dog's failing health and his imminent demise-even though the dog had apparently been dead for some time. I remember little else from an entire semester of Plato and Kant and Kierkegaard, but I do remember the reading, the tears, the old dog and his incontinence, and also how the old dog's inability to control his bladder formed a leitmotif in the poem, becoming as well an ominous symbol of the death about which my professor wrote and cried. As a passionate lover of dogs, I well understand the visceral connection one can have to her pet; after all, on a recent hike, I was more concerned when my dog momentarily limped than when my husband complained, for two or three miles, of a pulled muscle. Harder to comprehend, though, is the ways that viscera compels seemingly rational authors to write about their animals' deaths, and in so doing, to betray a rampant sentimentalism not seen in their entire body of literary work. D.H. Lawrence's ubiquitous sex scenes nearly compelled his readers to light up, though he could not write so realistically, or so interestingly, about his dead dog "Bibbles." Erica Jong's Fear of Flying may have been a catalyst for liberating women in the bedroom, but her "Best Friends" does nothing to revolutionize dead dog poetry. Nobel Prize winning Pablo Neruda, whose portrayal in Il Postino compelled people everywhere to appreciate the power of "metaphor," could not yet find the figurative language that would elevate "My Dog's Dead." Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, John Updike, Susan Musgrave, May Sarton, Richard Wilbur: all writers with an impressive oeuvre blighted by a dead dog poem. My life's work, though not impressive, has also not yet been compromised by an ode to the canine corpse. I might wish to consider this a mark of literary integrity, this unwillingness to have my work undermined by a weepy lyric about dog death. However, truth be told, up until recently the dogs I owned did not inspire poetry-in their lives, or in their deaths. Had I a dog who saved children in wells, or led the blind, or even sat loyally at my feet, I could well have succumbed to the impulse of memorializing the beast in verse. Instead, my dogs were merely mutts who destroyed carpets and spread mange and made my mother's life miserable (for she, dear woman, was made to care for them). Unlike Wordsworth, who with his dog was the "happiest pair on earth," I suffered my dogs-and their deaths-with a dispassionate bearing not much meant for lyricism. Except perhaps for Whiskers, my first dog and my best; or, perhaps she was best because she was first. Yet even Whiskers had nothing of the heroic about her: she was supposedly a Peak-a-Poo, though her appearance ran more towards a bloated Poodle than a Pekingese. She was fat and lazy, prematurely gray, smelly-not much of a companion, and also not much of a looker. At least not much of a looker to humans, though dogs seemed to think differently; she was humped by a German Shepherd three times her size, and had a late-term abortion because the puppies would have killed her otherwise. Rudyard Kipling writes "Buy a pup and your money will buy/Love unflinching that cannot lie." In my parents' case, their money bought a c-section, a litter of dead pups, and a very grouchy dog who died several years later anyway. Could I rhapsodize about my beloved Whiskers's death? Probably not, as she died when we were on vacation. On the night of her death-reported later by the pet sitter-I dreamed of her dying, an eerie premonition that might work well in a poem a la Poe, I guess. I certainly must have discounted the nocturnal vision, for when we arrived home from our trip, I leapt from the car shouting "Whiskers," and ran through the house looking for my beloved fat dog. Her lair, in the basement, was covered by urine- and feces-stained newspapers. The dog had lost all function; the 12-year-old pet sitter, any ability to clean the mess up. There was no Whiskers. The growing bulge on her stomach was cancer after all. Little in Whisker's death would encourage poetry. She was wrapped in a garbage bag and |
buried by the neighbors, location unspecified: I could not even stand at her graveside and wail. Richard Wilbur (who also, it may be noted, wrote about a toad's death) might resonate with my own experience, for in "The Pardon" he writes "My dog lay dead five days without a grave." But Wilbur seems to feel this oversight more grievously, for he apologizes to the dog's "tongueless head" for the lack of proper burial, and also for the poet's errors in "the past." Having felt little remorse for Whisker's shoddy grave, nor for the misdiagnosis of her cancer, I, however, would be able to seek no pardon. Bimbo was our rebound dog-as, I guess, most Bimbos are. Why my upstanding Mennonite parents allowed us to name a dog Bimbo I will never know: perhaps it was the communicable disease he brought into the house, his tawdry looks, his sheer vapidity. We bought Bimbo a few weeks after Whiskers's death, from a back alley breeder who lived in a trailer house filled with dogs. I picked Bimbo out of the lot, although I can't imagine why: his was a Chihuahua mix, rat-like, with strange bald spots around each eye. Mange, the breeder whispered. We took him anyway. For safety reasons, the dog was confined to our laundry room (or so my mom said; she was probably embarrassed to have a bimbo in the house). He yapped at us from there, begging no doubt to be petted. But his disease only enhanced his hideous countenance, making it harder and harder to give him the attention he asked for. When we did pet him, he manifest his excitement in unseemly ways. Within weeks, his mange spread: he was quickly developing a bald head, which certainly did not enhance his appearance. Repeated trips to the veterinarian cost my parents more money, but the mange dips and the cream we gingerly spread on his scaly skin little helped. Instead, Bimbo-and the laundry room-increasingly smelled like a nursing home: like medicine, and urine, and death. Kipling, in his tribute to a dead dog, reminds his readers that "Nature permits" fourteen years of dog life before "the vet's unspoken prescription runs/To lethal chambers or loaded guns." For Bimbo, such was not the case. After only seven months of puppy hood, the veterinarian's prescription was neither lethal chamber nor loaded gun, but rather an euthanatizing needle. No one but my mother could bear to carry Bimbo to his death. Bimbo, too, was buried in an unspecified grave-more likely, Bimbo was incinerated in the veterinarian's backyard oven. We were not there to mourn, and hadn't much to mourn about. By the time we got Bo, we were somewhat jaded on dogs, having experienced the grotesque death of two within six months' time. Bo was a Beagle mix we dragged home from a house several blocks away; the owners were trying to get rid of the litter, and my siblings and I were sure my mom would want another dog. After cleaning up messes left by Whiskers and Bimbo, my mom adamantly refused Bo entrance into the house; he would be an "outside dog," she proclaimed, as if this were a special and honorable role. But as with most outside dogs, Bo was often left alone, hooked up to a chain that provided him a 12-foot radius of movement around the laundry line. Our attention to Bo was less than stellar: what kid wants to play with a dog outside when the television is inside? Once in awhile, we would run along the laundry line with him, or tickle him in the grass, but our ministrations were as our attention spans: short and unfocused. When winter came, mom moved Bo into the garage, and continued to operate as his sole companion. Mom worried, some, about our seeming lack of concern about the dog, and decided one afternoon to take Bo to the pound, figuring another family might better care for him-or, if not, death would be sweeter than neglect. She finally asked, several days later, whether we had seen Bo lately. Remembering that we had a dog, we hurried to the garage to pet him, but he was gone. Mom had made her point. There were to be no more dogs in my childhood, and no more canine deaths. And so I never, like Robert Herrick, gave a dog the "million teares" he promised his dead Spaniel, Tracie; I never, like Wordsworth, cursed those gods who had made a dog "stiff and chill." Perhaps now, my own storied history with canine death affords me a bit of cynicism when I read dead dog poetry. I am somewhat as a jilted lover reading the sonnets of Petrarch and, having been spurned by love, finding in the affectionate words nothing to recommend. Similarly, for me, poems like Wordsworth's "Idyllium" seem merely cloying and pathetic, for I do not understand the sentiment driving the poem and its forced rhyme, nor the emotion blinding the poet's judgment about imagery and language. Had I my own profound experiences with canine companions, and with their deaths, I might find in dead dog poems a certain kind of beauty, and expression, that I can not now appreciate. Or, more likely, the perfect paean to a dead dog just does not exist, and has not been written. For although something about the dead dog compels even the finest poets to pen their odes, the subject remains more opaque than war, or filial love, or God. The literary challenge for our time may be, then, to write the perfect dead dog poem, one unmatched by the centuries of dead dog poems that have come before. In a sense, the modernist anxiety about the past takes on magnificent proportions, having been revisited, now, by the dog-owning set. Writing the perfect dead dog poem means, of course, that the poet must own the perfect dog. And even now at my feet lies the most poem-worthy dog in the world, a Black Labrador named Flannery (after the majestic Miss O'Connor) who is loyal, and kind, and whose spirit "answers every mood," as Kipling wrote of his own dog (now dead). Of any dog in the canine kingdom, mine is surely capable to inspire a lyric or two, more so than Wordsworth's dog, or Updike's, or Neruda's. Thus, when my dog dies (for no doubt she will), I hope to have more discretion than some poets, who respond to the muse's call with unchecked emotion. Surely when the time comes, I will bid my beloved companion farewell, the dog having "torn my heart" utterly. Then, I will write my poem about the old dog's death, about her faithful life now gone "stiff and cold"; I will write with a power unmet by any in western literature, and with a beauty worthy of the Nobel Prize. For no one has written profoundly about a canine corpse because no one has owned my dog. |