“Dog’s Death” by John Updike

John Updike
Credit: neh.gov

John Updike’s “Dog’s Death” is a heartbreaking poem in which the narrator describes the final days of his dog’s life. It’s a poem about death, loss, showing dignity in the face of death, and the battle between nature and nurture.

The narrator of the poem and his family rescue a dog, who ends up dying from an illness that the family fails to detect. They assume that her behavior must be the result of being hit by a car.

“She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, ‘Good dog! Good dog!’ “

In the family’s distracted busyness, they don’t register the dog’s illness. “We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction,” the narrator explains. In fact, it turns out that what they call “shy malaise” is actually a ruptured liver. The narrator talks of the family trying to get the dog to play, not knowing that she was dying  — or, as the narrator says — “her heart was learning to lie down forever.”

Credit: howtoreadapoem.com

One morning, after getting his children “noisily fed” and off to school, the narrator and his wife find the dog “twisted and limp but still alive” under the bed of his youngest child. The dog dies in the car on the way to the vet, mourned by the narrator and his wife, who are racing to get the dog help.

The poem frames the final moment of the dog’s death as the final contest between the forces of nature and nurture. The narrator’s wife tries to call the dying dog back through her tears. But the dog can’t obey.

Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back at home, the parents make another discovery that further ennobles the dog to them:

“Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.”

The final heartbreaking lines of “Dog’s Death” pay homage to a dog who was trying her best to be obedient, even in the face of a terrible illness.