The poem’s title, “Your Dog Dies”, written by Raymond Carver, sounds like it would entail something depressing and heartbreaking, but something about the bluntness about it suggests something underneath the heartbreak. “it gets run over by a van/you find it at the side of the road/and bury it.”(ll. 1-3). are the lines that follow the title, and they have the same bluntness and matter-of-factness about them as the title. Is this some kind of coping mechanism? Or the first stage of grief, denial? Then the poem continues on with “you feel bad about it./you feel bad personally,”(ll. 4-5) which does not all sound like the speaker is filled with grief and sorrow and then the speaker goes on“but you feel bad for your daughter/because it was her pet,/and she loved it so./she used to croon to it/and let it sleep in her bed.”(ll. 6-10) and so a shift occurs in where the emotion lies. Then another shift happens, “you write a poem about it/you call it a poem for your daughter,/about the dog getting run over by a van/and how you looked after it,/took it out into the woods and buried it deep, deep,/and that poem turns out so good,/you’re almost glad the little dog/was run over, or else you’d never/have written that good poem”(ll. 11-20). When I read this, I laughed and felt bad for doing so, and this is where Carver walks a fine line and does it masterfully.
As a poet, I know the feeling of writing a poem and being like, “Wow, I really like that”. Then the irony of it all is that the poem is about something sad, or at the very least, something that is not a laughing matter, and yet I still like the poem. Carver captures this perfectly in “Your Dog Dies” by writing “a poem about writing a poem/about the death of that dog”(ll.22-23) and then liking the poem written about the tragedy. As the speaker says in the poem, it makes you wonder if you should be glad that the tragedy happened. It is somewhat paradoxical, obviously, no one wanted the dog to die, especially in such a gruesome manner, but then the speaker would have never written such a good poem. Liking a poem is different than liking tragedy, and poetry is a way to deal with tragedy, but it is curious how close sorrow, satisfaction, and humor are. Carver ends the poem with “but while you’re writing you/hear a woman scream/your name, your first name,/both syllables,/and your heart stops./after a minute, you continue writing./she screams again./you wonder how long this can go on.”(ll. 24-31) Leaving the question– how much humor is there in grief and when is too soon too soon?