A Dog Has Died

"Ode to my Socks" by Pablo Neruda (1956)

The poetry collection Odes to Common Things contains 225 odes, many of them to quotidian objects. Like “A Dog Has Died,” the poem “Ode to my Socks” elevates a very quotidian object to something highly metaphorical, beautiful and “heavenly.” Reading these poems together gives us a better sense of the sentimentality and imagination with which Neruda processes daily life.

"Epitaph to a Dog" by Lord Byron (1808)

Lord Byron (1788-1824), an English poet, also wrote an elegy to a departed canine. Though written in a very different form (iambic pentameter couplets to Neruda’s free verse), Byron’s poem carries many of the same philosophical ideas as Neruda’s. Byron’s dog is “the firmest friend” with an “honest heart” and more honorable than a human, possessing “all the virtues of Man without his Vices.”

"Materialist" by Ken Babstock (2006)

In “Materialist,” Canadian poet Ken Babstock deals, like Neruda, with the consequences and limitations of an essentially materialist outlook on life. Like Neruda’s “A Dog Has Died,” Babstock’s free verse poem finds a strange unease in accepting a world limited to the things we can measure. It also hopes for, but is ultimately unable to hold, a more spiritual vision.