James Dickey's A Dog Sleeping on My Feet

This poem interested me because of the symbiotic relationship of the man and the dog. While we expect man and dog to coexist amicably, hence the dog’s nickname “man’s best friend,” this poem takes a different turn. The man allows the dog to sleep on his feet because the dog is evidently his muse. The lines “The poem is beginning to move / Up through my pine-prickling legs / …Taking hold of the pen by my fingers” indicate that the inspiration for the emerging poetry is coming from the dog because the motivation is traveling up the man’s legs from whence the dog rests. Also, there are repeated words that show the man is feeling the weight of the dog, possibly causing his feet and legs to be falling asleep. For example, the writer’s “feet beneath him [are] dying like embers” because of the pressure. Also, the poet’s legs are “pine-prickling,” there is a “dazzle of nails through the ankles,” there is a reference to “pins,” and finally the poet again mentions his “killed legs.” All of these references to the dog causing the man’s feet and legs to feel pressure that take place throughout the poetic scenes indicate that the dog is the source of the man’s poetry.

It seems to me like the dog’s spirits takes over the man’s because the writer now seems to be a dog on a chase, pursuing a fox. Images from Disney’s The Fox and the Hound came to my mind. I think the tone goes from calm, when the man is sitting with his notebook and trying not to move and wake the dog, to urgent when the dog’s spirit comes to life and the hunt starts. “All, all are running” and the fox is described as “flying,” so a lot of motion is felt, and the very essence of a hunt is an urgent one. The fox runs for its life, and the dog instinctually pursues to kill, putting all of its energy towards that goal. Abruptly, the tone again changes to calmness as the setting of the poetry jumps out of the chase and back to the man who is “Stock-still” so as not to wake the dog and lose his ability to perceive the chase. Then the chase’s urgency is felt again but at last fizzles out as “the dog gets up and goes out / To wander the dawning yard.” I think the poet is saddened in a way by the dog’s departure because he can no longer write from the dog’s perspective. His hand “Shall falter, and fail / Back into the human tongue” because the dog got up. It is interesting to me also that he considers his writing ability to be failing when it is only able to speak as humans do. This is the true sign of a poet. He wants to be able to speak as the dog, the subject of his poem.

However, it seems that the man uses the dog for more than just fodder to write about. When the man goes to bed, he still thinks about the places the dog took him and seemingly really enjoys it. He smiles as he smells the fox. The last line of the poem, “Sleeping to grow back my legs” seems to reference the dog again, as the dog’s weight was what immobilized the man’s legs temporarily. The poet seems sad but accepting that he must go back to the way his family expects him to be; he must return to being a man the next day and embody the dog anymore. I was intrigued by the notion of the man seemingly not just trying to write from the dog’s perspective but actually preferring the lifestyle of the dog because I think that most people think humans have the most desirable lives.