You don’t really own a dog, you live with one. You live with wet noses, happy wags and unrestrained love. This brevity of our being is revisited courtesy of celebrated poet Mary Oliver in the trailing lines.
In her emotionally eloquent poetry collection Dog Songs, Mary Oliver brings the sheer gentleness and genius of her craft all over again. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet has paw prints hopping through the pages. What better way to show how simple life is if we let it be. What we own and what owns us.
In these poems of love, longing and grief, Mary Oliver writes about her dog Percy while there are others about different lessons from dogs. Dog Songs celebrates dogs Oliver encountered and was affectionate with and shows how integral they were to the poet’s daily life. Dog Songs showcases the power and depth of the human-animal exchange, a perspective with extraordinary vision.
Verses from Dog Songs
“The Sweetness of Dogs”
… Thus, we sit, myself
thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich
it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile,
leans against me and gazes up into
my face. As though I were just as wonderful
as the perfect moon.
“A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not, therefore, own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them …
A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing. . .”
— Mary Oliver
Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honour as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?
LITTLE DOG’S RHAPSODY IN THE NIGHT
He puts his cheek against mine
and makes small, expressive sounds.
And when I’m awake, or awake enoughhe turns upside down, his four paws
in the air
and his eyes dark and fervent.“Tell me you love me,” he says.
“Tell me again.”
Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over
he gets to ask.
I get to tell.
In ‘School’, Mary’s recitation on the impermanence of love and loss is as profound as it is simple:
School
You’re like a little wild thing
That was never sent to school.
Sit, I say, and you jump up.
Come, I say, and you go galloping down the sand
To the nearest dead fish
With which you perfume your sweet neck.
It is summer.
How many summers does a little dog have?
Run, run Percy.
This is our school.
“And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old—or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.”
―Mary Oliver, Dog Songs
Mary Oliver passed away in January 2019. She was a lifelong dog lover, whose poems almost always wandered into them. The most famous of them being the ones featuring ‘Percy’, a dog whom she rescued.
Four more of her poems worth reading
Percy wasn’t her only muse, and Dog Songs isn’t her only word on dogs. She named him after the Romantic poet Percy Shelley, and across her other collections she kept returning to the same questions: how to live, what we owe what we love, and what’s left when it’s gone.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Excerpt from In Blackwater Woods
to live in this world
you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go
I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life
Love, love, love says Percy.
And run as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.
Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.
The Storm
Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.
Mary Oliver understood it: a dog teaches you how to pay attention. If you’re ready for that lesson in your own home, a dog in India is waiting for you.
There was this beautiful film that I watched in a drive-in cinema while we lived in Mombasa.
‘The Ugly Dachshund’ was a funny. touching film that filled all my five-year-old heart.
It is little remembered, but it has become one of those pockets of nostalgia that makes one wistful.