Seven short lines, and a whole life of service is folded up inside them. The speaker is an old dog, or someone who sees himself as one, looking back from a place of comfort. "Settling pleased me" is the first thing he says, and the verb carries a double meaning. It is what a dog does at the end of the day, turning in a circle before lying down. It is also what a creature does when it stops striving and accepts the shape of its life. The poem's central idea grows from that ambiguity: contentment and submission may be the same gesture.
The second line gives the settling a history. It happens "where I was once a petitioner / for my master." "Petitioner" is a surprisingly formal word for a dog. It belongs to courts, councils and churches, to people who ask for favours from above, and it turns the begging dog at the table into a figure of ceremony. The line break helps. "Petitioner" ends its line on its own, and "for my master" hangs on the next line like the thing being pleaded for. The speaker has arrived at ease, but the poem reminds us, quietly, that ease was once a request.
Then the sentence changes shape. "My wife a fox / and I a dog of great families" has no verbs, and the lack of them makes these lines sound like entries in a register or the labels on a family crest. The pairing is odd and a little funny. A fox is the dog's wild, clever cousin, a creature that has never knelt to anyone, and the speaker has married into that independence. The word "fox" also has a cheeky second meaning, since it is old slang for an attractive person, so the wife is both a wild animal and a catch. Against her, the speaker's own boast of "great families" sounds like pedigree, a respectable domestic dog's pride in his papers. It is also tempting to hear a pun in "families," because the Latin word for a household animal is related to *familia*, and "familiaris" is part of the dog's scientific name. The poem never says so, which is why this remains a reading rather than a fact, but it would explain why the next line turns to Latin.
"I knew myself in Latin— / the best way to bow." The line seems to echo the old advice to know yourself, but here self-knowledge arrives in the language of scholars, priests and classifiers, a language of authority and not of barking or scent. To be named in Latin is to be catalogued by someone else. The dash before the last line works like a small pause for lowering the head. Dogs really do bow, front legs stretched forward, when they invite play, and the poem lets that physical image rest underneath the intellectual one. Knowing yourself through the master's learned vocabulary is, the speaker says, "the best way to bow," and the superlative is the most interesting word in the poem. It could be pride in doing even servility with style. It could equally be a dry confession that the finest form of obedience is the one that feels like understanding. The poem refuses to tell us which.
The form supports this balance. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines swell and shrink: a three-beat opening, a long, stretched second line, then short phrases that fall into an even rhythm. The last line is made almost entirely of one-syllable words, and it ends on "bow," whose rounded vowel lets the voice sink slightly, as if the sentence itself were lowering its head. Quieter sound links help too. The soft *s* of "Settling" and "pleased" gives the opening its purr of satisfaction, while the hard consonants of "dog," "great," "Latin" and "best" give the later lines a more formal, upright tone, which is exactly the tone a dog might use when pretending to dignity.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It gives us a whole career of loyalty, a marriage, a social standing and a philosophy of self-knowledge in about thirty words, and it never explains its own joke. The reader is left deciding whether the old dog is wise or merely tamed, and whether the languages we use to describe ourselves are ever entirely our own.