A Dog Has Died

In analysis of poetry, it is typical to speak of a relationship between the poet and the reader interrupted by the intermediary figure of “the speaker,” an imagined character who voices the poem. Even though it might make sense to assume that the poet is in fact the poem’s narrator, or even though the poet shares similarities with the speaker or narrator of the poem, it’s routinely frowned upon to automatically assert that poet and speaker are one and the same. Some poems, however, are confessional by nature. In the case of “A Dog Has Died,” the poet and speaker are very closely analogous. Written in the poet’s later years, the poem is explicitly set on Neruda’s home of Isla Negra and commemorates a dog that actually did die around the time of this poem’s composition. Furthermore, like Neruda himself proclaimed to be, the speaker is an atheist: “I, the materialist, who never believed / in any promised heaven” (Lines 7-8).

The kinship of the speaker and the poet has overtones for the interpretation of the poem within the context of Neruda’s life. Neruda wrote the poem after participating in the Spanish Civil War. During the war and in the years following, Neruda witnessed the corruption of the Chilean government and the execution of his close friend, activist and fellow poet Federico García Lorca.