Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Today I would like to write about Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Dog". This poem is rather long including eighty-four lines. The way I interpreted this poem when I began reading it, was simply a dog wondering around the city. The reader imideiatly gets and image about the setting of where this dog is and the things he is seeing. I think that imagery is one of the things that Lawrence mastered in this poem. As I went on reading the poem, I began realizing that this poem was not just about some dog wondering the streets, but instead how a human should live their life. The poem talks about how the dog does not care about the policemen because they are useless to him. This is a huge symbol to me about how we should live our lives. We should not worry about what those we don't care about think about us, instead we should continue on "through the streets". Another thing that I noticed about this poem was that Lawrence used a pun with the the words "tale" and "tail" in lines 54-56. I also noticed a lot of personification given to the dog in what I thought was the attempt to symbolize a human. In line 58 it states that the dog is deomocratic which clearly is impossible, there for not only showing the symbolism but the metaphore used as well. I think that my favorite part of this poem was one that it was about an animal and I love animals being that I am a zoology major, and two that for the first time I felt like I was reading a story. I know that a lot of the poems that we have read are telling stories,  but I have never felt like it was a story until reading this poem. I also enjoyed the staggering of stanzas toward the end of the poem. It showed creativity and that Lawrence did not want to be like the writers before him. The last thing I would like to talk about is the last lines of the poem, "just about to spout forth/some Victorian answer/to everything" (lines 82-83). I found this rahter amusing because I have spent a lot of time this semester writing about the modernists and their "truth". I find the comment in the above lines amusing in the sense that Lawrence is poking fun at the Victorian era in the sence that they always had some idealistic answer for everything.