The Poetry of Dogs

Whether the dog is domesticated as a pet and there to enjoy life with a family or as a work-dog herding sheep, helping to hunt, police or guard, the dog has proved time and time again to have many invaluable uses.

They come in all shapes and sizes from sought after breeds to lowly mongrels each with an array of qualities that give them distinct personalities.

From earliest times dogs have been able to find a unique place fulfilling the needs of their keepers and often there is equal devotion from master to servant. A dog’s life no longer has to have negative connotations as so many pooches are loved, extravagantly fed, groomed, petted and pawed over, all perhaps more than our fellow man.

Dogs were even worshipped as deities in Mesopotamian times and across several cultures and civilisations including Hindu, Chinese and Greek, they are the helpers, the watchers or guardians of sacred or sensitive sites.

Between then and now poets have written verse, both serious and humorous, in attempts to keep a poetic track both of feelings and as a tribute to our four-legged friends and their adventures.

1 - The Poetry of Dogs - An Introduction

2 - A Friendly Welcome by Lord Byron

3 - A Popular Personage At Home by Thomas Hardy

4 - The Power of the Dog by Rudyard Kiping

5 - Verse for a Certain Dog by Dorothy Parker

6 - The Best Friend by Meribah Abbott

7 - The Joy of a Dog by Edgar Albert Guest

8 - Dog by Harold Munro

9 - My Comforter by Anonymous

10 - Four Feet. 'The Woman in His Life' by Rudyard Kipling

11 - The Dog and His Master by Anne Kingsmill-Finch

12 - Little Lost Pup by Arthur Guiterman

13 - A Little Dog That Wags His Tail by Emily Dickinson

14 - The Hairy Dog by Herbert Asquith

15 - Dogs and Weather by Winifred Welles

16 - Incident. Charactristic of a Favourite Dog Which Belonged to a Friend of the Author by William Wordsworth

17 - Confessions of a Glutton by Don Marquis

18 - The Fable of the Shepherd and Wolf by John Gay

19 - On a Spaniel Called 'Beau', Killing a Young Bird by William Cowper

20 - Beau's Reply by William Cowper

21 - Contentment by Burges Johnson wav

22 - The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog by Anonymous

23 - The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat by Eugene Field

24 - How the Feud Started by Arthur Guiterman

25 - Tray by Robert Browning

26 - The Dog and the Water Lily. No Fable by William Cowper

27 - The Irish Greyhound by Katherine Phillips

28 - The Fable of the Mastiff by John Gay

29 - The Dog in the Manger by Aphra Behn

30 - Towser, A True Tale, 20th July 1806 by Robert Tannahill

31 - The Dog of St Bernard's by Caroline Fry Wilson

32 - Sonnet - To Tartar, A Terrier Beauty by Thomas Lovell Beddoes

33 - Tobias's Dog by Mary Howitt

34 - I Started Early – Took my Dog by Emily Dickinson

35 - Canis Major by Robert Frost

36 - Man and Dog by Edward Thomas

37 - Dog Days by Amy Lowell

38 - So This Is How I Turned into a Dog by Vladamir Mayakovsky

39 - The Dogs by Arthur Symons

40 - To a Black Greyhound by Julian Grenfell

41 - An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog by Oliver Goldsmith

42 - The Dog Tupman by Stella Benson

43 - Upon His Spaniel Tracy by Robert Herrick

44 - To Rollo by Kenneth Grahame

45 - Ruby by Edward Lear

46 - To Flush, My Dog by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

47 - Kaiser Dead by Matthew Arnold

48 - Epitaph to a Dog by Lord Byron

49 - Last Words To A Dumb Friend by Thomas Hardy