Mark Doty's Poem 'Golden Retrievals'

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Mark Doty’s poem, “Golden Retrievals” describes the thoughts of a dog who’s merry tone contrasts with the human’s sentimental view towards life. The poem is in a form of a Shakespearean sonnet, but uses slant rhymes to further portray the speaker is a canine. Doty uses images, rhythm, rhyme, and organization to encourage the tension between the speaker and the human. Through merry and sentimental diction, the speaker joyous life is compared to the sad life of his human. The dog is, “thrillingly”(6) enjoying the world, “sniff[ing]”(4), anything he could find and playing “fetch”(1). The author bounces from one noun to the next allowing the reader to imagine the dog running from one thing to the next, the speaker appears to be carefree and …show more content…

The speaker scans his surroundings, “muck, pond, ditch, residue”(5), spondee, stressed words, are used to show the typical image of a distracted dog. This is further emphasized in the enjambments and caesuras at the hyphens and colons, to express the unpredictable actions of the speaker. At the beginning the speaker includes rhetorical questions, to highlight the merry, short attention span, “Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so” (1-2). The rhyme scheme is abba ccdd efef gh and often are slant rhymes which shows the dog is not as educated as a human. The vowel ‘o’ in “or else you’re off in some fog concerning/ --tomorrow”(9-10) is an assonance and “bow-wow…”(14), is onomatopoeia illustrates the dog howling and barking at his human.
“Golden Retrievals” also can be seen as golden retriever, which is most likely the breed of the speaker; asks the reader to live life in the moment. Doty describes through images, slant rhymes, rhythm, and organization to enforce the tension of the poem between the speaker and the human. The tension of the poem lies in the merry tone of the personified dog, which lightens the morbid context, but it’s also seriously discusses grief through the humans sentimental

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