I can now mourn the dead

The Pardon

(Spoiler, my paralyzed dog recovered!)

Upon my first read through of “The Pardon” by Richard Wilbur, I was both moved and agonized. Last weekend, we put our family dog to sleep. Thirteen years ago, I found my first dog under a pine tree, paralyzed from botulism. If we read these poems as self-contained microcosms of wordplay that illicit reactions or feelings I would have to say “The Pardon” was an overwhelming success. A success not simply because I happen to have a memory of my dog laying “dead” under a tree with flies buzzing about him, or because I said goodbye to another best companion so recently; it was a success because, as readers, we can all in some way relate to numbness after loss and fear of death.

Reading that “My dog lay dead five days without a grave” was both heartbreaking and confounding, particularly if we are to believe that this dog was loved, as may be construed in the last line of the first stanza: “I who loved him while he kept alive.” But that phrasing is strange. Perhaps Wilbur is attempting to stick to some form of rhyme scheme or meter—I am terrible at identifying both, so would love to hear what others think—but to me, the use of the word “kept” feels telling. “While he kept alive” feels more active than how we usually refer to living; the act of keeping alive of trying to stay alive carries so much more effort than simply being alive or saying I loved him when he was alive.

If the first stanza did not make me expect emotional distancing, the second certainly does. The speaker cannot approach the dog and cannot bring themselves to fully accept their dog’s death…but their other senses are telling them this regardless. They can smell the honeysuckle “twined with another odor heavier still” and can “hear the flies’ intolerable buzz.” If two of the speaker’s senses are telling them that the dog is dead, why is there so much hesitation?

“Well, I was ten and very much afraid.”

Death and loss, particularly when encountered by a child, are difficult to rationalize. To further this point, I find the following portion of the stanza quite interesting: “In my kind world the dead were out of range / And I could not forgive the sad or strange / In beast or man. My father took the spade.” If within the speaker’s world, the dead are somehow out of sight (range), then to see them would have been sad, strange, terrible, even ghastly. Where things become interesting is that the speaker cannot forgive man or beast, but for what, for dying? Or, it is the “sin” of both dying and accepting death through burial that the speaker finds unforgivable. When reading this through the lens of detachment and disassociation, I think it is this acceptance the speaker finds so unpardonable.

The last three stanzas are trippy and tricky. My only thought on the glowing green light comes from reading a portion of Roughing It by Mark Twain, where he describes the bones of an old steer glowing with a phosphorus green hue in the moonlight (apparently, this is not completely impossible???). Beyond the potentially supernatural aspect of glowing corpses, seeing your dead dog rise from the ground is certainly troubling. However, the symbolism of not processing and accepting loss only for that loss and trauma to return to haunt you is impossible to ignore. This symbolism, I believe can be read in the line, “And death was breeding in his lively eyes.” Of course “death” and “lively” create a paradox, but it is also highly ironic how the dead can haunt us or feel closer to us than the living.

Within the last stanza, I do think the speaker is edging towards acceptance by “Asking forgiveness” and believing that “the past was never past redeeming,” we can read the speaker as having begged pardon for the callous but defensive denial of death, realizing that past traumas or mistakes made are never past the point of atonement. The speaker lastly “beg[s] death’s pardon now. And mourn[s] the dead.” While mourning and grief may not be the happy emotions one could hope for following acceptance of a loss and release of numb detachment, it is nevertheless the “healthy” process. By asking for forgiveness, the speaker is allowing the haunting specter of the dog to pass on; in a way asking for forgiveness can be the first step in accepting that you could be pardoned, while the element of mourning returns the speaker to a more present state of being—no longer kept alive, but perhaps living.

I originally wanted to read this as a war poem, and perhaps I could/should have. However, that was not the emotion I brought to my latest reading; this is something I occasionally like about New Criticism, it can be nice to experience and analyze the text without much attention to historical influences that might otherwise scream for attention.