Few poems take a glamorous lie and argue with it as patiently as this one. Its subtitle, «Romanticism in suicide amongst other things», sets up the dispute. The speaker will look at how suicide gets dressed up as beautiful and poetic, and then decide whether to believe it. The title sits oddly against that. A puppy is small, soft and dependent on someone else's care. The poem never explains the word, but I read it as a young, tender self, or perhaps an endearment from someone who wants to protect that self.
The first stanza is the seductive voice, and it is cleverly built. "a balcony seems to be the perfect place to be" leans on the word "seems", and the "be...be" echo gives the line a lulling, trance-like drift. The imagery is pretty and eerie at once: "sanguine covered eyelids, trickle to pale lips". "Sanguine" means both blood-red and cheerfully hopeful, so the fantasy looks optimistic while carrying blood. The speaker imagines "a sweet lover, or callosity pushing you off", so the fall is either a tender act or a cruel one, anything but a choice. "Callosity" means hardened skin, which makes it a sharp word for the world's indifference. The held breath of "no hesitation, no blinking. not one little breath" comes with one of the few full stops in the poem, as if everything has stopped.
Then the stanza turns on itself. The last three lines drop the dreamy tone for cold logic. "nobody has been in love with sallow cadavers" strips away the glamour with one unflattering adjective. "remarkable dead people were remarkable first" is almost a joke, and its repetition makes the point: people are remembered for what they did while alive, not for dying. "my greatest downfall would be untimely death" puns on the balcony's fall while saying plainly that death would be a failure, not a triumph.
The second stanza is only three lines, as if a hand has been held out quickly. The speaker shifts to "you" and says, "you're not alone, you don't have to be alone". The doubled sentence sounds like something repeated because the first attempt did not land. What follows is a list with no verbs: "whispers texts on read, cancelled calls, adieus / goodbye messages and vacant lock screens". These are the small, modern leftovers of connection. With no punctuation between "whispers" and "texts on read", the items blur into one lonely heap. Judging by the imagery, they could be evidence of isolation, or the debris a death would leave for others to scroll through.
In the final stanza the speaker takes the "i" back. "my worth is not placed inside of other people" rejects the idea that a lover, whether the rescuing or the pushing kind, decides a person's value. The "sweet lover" of the first stanza reappears as "my sweet honey arms", so the sweetness moves from an imagined outsider into the speaker's own body. The word "made" appears twice: "made to love in this life", "made not for ends". "Ends" suggests both endings and aims, so the speaker refuses both a final act and a final purpose handed down from outside. The last line, "the romanticism found in many other things", returns to the subtitle and turns its "amongst other things" from a throwaway into the answer. The poem does not reject romanticism. It relocates it.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme, no capital letters and very little punctuation, and the lines are close in length, so the voice stays level and conversational, more like someone thinking aloud than performing. Without rhyme it never sounds like a song about death. The chiming comes from internal echoes instead: be/be, remarkable/remarkable, alone/alone, made/made. The stanza sizes also tell the story. Eight lines give the fantasy plenty of room, three lines break in with comfort, and four lines close with the speaker's own claim.
The poem matters because it argues by tone and wit rather than by lecture. It admits the pull of the fantasy and gives it a full stanza of beautiful language before taking it apart. It also models a useful reading skill: noticing how a myth is built from its images and its words, and then seeing where it stops holding together.