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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Dog’s Hair and Tail
Images of the dog’s fur and tail repeat multiple times throughout the poem. The dog has a “shaggy coat” (Line 5), unwelcome shedding “hair or […] mange” (Line 23), fur that defines him completely with a “sweet and shaggy” life (Line 34). His tail is particularly worthy of description: “fan-like” (Line 13), “envi[able]” (Line 37), and “golden” (Line 44). The repetition of these specifically animal traits of a tail and shaggy fur contrast with and ground the speaker’s anthropomorphizing of his pet. These snapshots of the dog also explain how a materialist copes with grief: Though now he imagines a dog heaven for his pet, he really memorializes his animal through happy memories—the same way he pays tribute to the people he has lost and for whom he cannot picture some kind of magical afterlife. Finally, these traits symbolize the speaker’s hope for transformation, not into an animal, but a more spiritual, more dog-like, joyfully sensory person.
The Sea
The Sea only crops up once in “A Dog Has Died,” but it is a very potent symbol. In Stanza 5, the speaker describes how he and his dog often “walked together by the shores of the sea” (Line 38). When they do so, the dog “jump[s] about, / full of the voltage of the sea’s movement” (Lines 41-42), excitedly playing in the surf. Here, the dog’s play at the shore of the sea demarcates him as a liminal figure, one between the strictures of shame and self-awareness that hem in human life and the boundless freedom symbolized by the water. The dog’s ability to be part of the material world (on the land), yet still transgress into the sea and be filled with the sea’s own ‘voltage,’ signals this liminal quality. The sea symbolizes the in-the-moment joy lacking in the speaker’s life, which he, unlike his dog, is not able to embody or touch, and therefore envies the animal for accessing. This jealousy is literal: The speaker rues not getting to feel the happiness of the dog as the animal runs into the sea while the poet must remain watching on the shore.
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