BEHAF - Memorials - Favorite Poems, Where to Bury a Dog

Where to Bury a Dog

We would say that there are various places in which a dog may be buried. We are thinking particularly now of a hound who, so far as we are aware, never entertained a mean or unworthy thought. This dog is buried beneath a cherry tree, under four feet of garden loam, and at its proper season the cherry strews petals on the green lawn of his or her grave.

Beneath such trees, such shrubs, they slept in the drowsy summer, or gnawed at a flavorous bone, or lifted head to challenge some intruder. These are good places, in life or in death. Yet it is a small matter. For if the dog be well remembered, if sometimes he leaps through your dreams actual as life, eyes kindling, laughing, begging, it matters not at all where that dog sleeps. On a hill where the wind is unrebuked, and the trees are roaring, or beside a stream he knew in puppyhood, or somewhere in the flatness of a pastureland, where most exhilarating cattle graze. It is all one to the dog, and all one to you, and nothing is gained, and nothing lost - if memory lives. But there is one best place to bury a dog.

If you bury him in this spot, he will come to you when you call - come to you over the grim, dim frontiers of death, and down well-remembered paths, and to your side again. And though you call a dozen living dogs to heel they shall not growl at him, nor resent his coming, for he belongs there. People may scoff at you, who see no lightest blade of grass bent by his footfall, who hear no whimper, people who may never really have had a dog. Smile at them, for you shall know something that is hidden from them, and which is well worth the knowing. The one best place to bury a dog is in the heart of the master.

~ Ben Hur Lampman, 1925

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