The word "dog" never appears in "A Sound!", yet by the end there is no doubt who is listening. Sasha Fenn lets the clues gather: ears and tail pricked, "brown and white fur," a bay, a sprint, a "couple" calling from behind. The humans are never called humans. To her they are "monkeys." Telling the whole scene through an animal's senses is the poem's central move, and its central idea grows out of it: wholehearted attention to the world is a reward in itself, even when what you were attending to turns out to be nothing.
The structure rests on a refrain. After the title announces "A Sound!", the phrase opens five separate stanzas, like a dog's head snapping up each time the noise returns. Nothing rhymes and there is no regular metre. The rhythm comes from changes in line length instead. The stanza about the grass is one long, sprawling sentence, and its repeated "across" ("across the grass… across the fleeting footsteps of the breeze") carries the reader's breath over the field the way the sound travels. Then the poem snaps shut into two blunt lines: "Not music, something more. / Not silence, less." The asymmetry is clever. The sound sits at the edge of perception, something that can be described only by what it isn't.
The imagery is richest where the dog's senses are working hardest. Colours arrive in pairs, and the second half of each pair is a sharper version of the first: "ancient yellow" becomes "aged paper," "gleaming green" becomes "scintillating emerald." Dry grass turns to something brittle and handled, living grass to something glittering. It feels like perception sharpening as she concentrates. The breeze has "fleeting footsteps" and "coaches the oaks to bend and dance," so the whole landscape seems to be moving, and the sound slips through it unseen. When it "echoes off the pure snowy / white and scarlet rose of the home behind her," the house gets the same vivid palette as the field. The poem never sets home against wilderness. It is all one bright, alert world, and even "the ants hearken," a deliberately old-fashioned verb that makes the listening feel almost ceremonial.
The humans are where the language changes. Their calling is a "sensible, logical, / incomprehensible expostulation." The first two adjectives are what people pride themselves on, and the third is what the dog actually hears: noise, however reasonable. "Expostulation" is itself a pompous word, which makes the humans slightly ridiculous. The next line, "It's inconceivably important that she should turn about and see what the monkeys want," is long, flat and heavy with mock-seriousness, and it sounds more like a memo than the shimmering lines before it. Judging by the tone, the joke is that the grand human demand matters far less to her than a whisper in the grass. Her world is described in poetry, theirs in prose.
Then comes the collapse: "No sound. / It's gone. / Oh well." Three tiny lines follow all that lush description, and the deflation is funny. "Oh well" is also quietly wise. She has run, barked and ignored her owners for nothing, and she isn't troubled. What mattered was the pursuit, the moment she was "burning with curiosity." The poem has also been honest about the sound all along. It never says what the sound was, only how it felt to hear it.
That is why this small, comic poem is worth reading closely. It treats a dog's curiosity with the dignity we usually give to human searching, and it makes us a little envious. Most of us turn around when we're called. The poem asks what we might notice if, now and then, we didn't. It is also easy to read the unnamed sound as a stand-in for anything elusive we chase, an idea, a feeling, a line of verse, though the poem never says so. Its final shrug suggests that the chase was never wasted.