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.