Nobody apologizes this thoroughly for something they truly regret. From the first line, Pamela Hobart Carter's "Apology" promises a confession and delivers a love song to a dog, and through the dog, to the person who lives with him. The speaker says "I'm sorry" again and again, but every offense on the list turns out to be a gift. Only the last charge, that the dog "compels / you to love him," is the real point.
The comedy depends on deadpan. The dog shadows "you" around the attic, "from desk / to window," as the pair contemplate "tough computer programming issues / at which dogs notoriously shine." The speaker knows perfectly well that dogs do not shine at programming. The joke is that the dog has appointed himself a colleague. Next comes the guard dog who isn't one. He curls "into a protective C" at the top of the stairs, a lovely image because the animal's body forms a letter, a small curved wall. Yet he "fails / to bark unless, of course, the intruder thinks / to use the doorbell." The line break after "fails" lets the failure hang for a beat before the "of course" delivers the wink. The poem implies that the guarding is in the curl, not the bark.
The sound of the poem changes with the dog. When the doorbell rings, the language turns noisy: "clamor / of the clapper," "dashes and woofs / and raises the roof." The hard consonants and the near-rhyme of "woofs" and "roof" make the sentence skid across the floor. Then the poem settles, and the dog is "calmer / than a summer wind, calmer than the yogi." The repeated "calmer," with the line break pushing the second comparison forward, slows the rhythm to a loose-leash stroll. By the time we reach "tail swinging, mouth in a big, wide laugh," the dog has a face, and a human one. His happiness is the nearest thing the poem has to a refrain.
There is no rhyme scheme, no regular meter and no stanza break. The twenty-four lines form one unbroken block, and long sentences spill over the line endings. That suits a speaker who can't stop apologizing. The "sorry" never stands as a solemn sentence of its own. It is slipped into the middle of lines: "He accompanies your every step. I'm sorry / he curls," and later "then, I'm sorry I / brought home this dog." Breaking the line after "I" gives a small, theatrical hesitation, as if the speaker were struggling to look guilty and failing.
The only moment that sounds like a real complaint is also the most affectionate. "You must walk and walk and walk him / and he draws you outdoors in black, in wet." The tripled "walk" enacts the chore's repetition, and "in black, in wet" strips away nouns to give us night and rain in a few blunt syllables. Yet the verb is "draws," a word of attraction. The same pattern drives the ending, where "this dog" is repeated like a drumbeat and the verbs climb: he "lures," "holds," "empties," "compels." The costs move from time to home to money and finally to the heart, and the strongest verb is saved for the strongest effect. After that, "I'm sorry" is the shortest sentence in the poem, and it no longer sounds like an apology at all.
It would be easy to dismiss this as light verse, but its comedy does serious work. People often say tender things as complaints, because complaint lets them be affectionate without sounding sentimental. The poem also quietly sets two kinds of life against each other. One is the attic, with its desk and abstract problems. The other is the dog's world of stairs, doorbells, weather and wagging. Judging by the imagery, the speaker's real "crime" is rescuing "you" from too much work and handing you something warm that needs you. The poem's final trick is that the apology is accepted before it is even finished. A reader who has laughed along has already forgiven the speaker, and fallen a little in love with the dog.