Eight short lines, one unbroken sentence, not a single full stop: Dave Bonta's "Dogged" is over almost before it has begun, and that brevity is part of its argument. On a cold, wet day the speaker closes a door on a dog. The dog "did not / intend to trouble me", and yet the poem insists that it does. What it brings with it is "the shortness of time / and muchness of fur". The central idea is that the speaker is shutting out more than an animal. A dog is a warm, shedding, fast-ageing reminder that living things are brief, and that loving them costs something. The speaker wants to be "left to my life", and the poem quietly lets us judge what kind of life that is.
The title does a lot of work. "Dogged" usually means stubborn, and it also means pursued, as in being dogged by misfortune. Both senses fit. The dog is persistent at the door, but the real pursuer is time, which has no more intention of troubling the speaker than the dog does. Nobody here means any harm, yet the speaker feels hounded all the same. Notice that the speaker never appears as the subject of a verb. There is no "I shut the door," only the bare participle "shutting," and "me" and "my" appear only as the one being troubled and the one who owns a life. The speaker seems almost to watch himself do it, which gives the refusal a flat, slightly guilty detachment.
The structure is four unrhymed couplets, and the line breaks are where the poem does its thinking. "Shutting the door" ends a line, and the dog arrives only in the next, so the door closes before we know what it closes on. "A dog that did not" stops on a negative, and the small hesitation makes the dog's innocence feel deliberate. The trouble then spills over a stanza break, as though it cannot be contained: "trouble me" ends one couplet, and "with the shortness of time" begins the next. The lowercase, unpunctuated lines read like a thought half-spoken, and the shortness of the lines enacts the "shortness of time" they complain about.
The sound of the poem is carefully tuned. The opening "cold wet day" is three monosyllables in a row, each demanding stress, so the line drags like the weather. "Shortness" and "muchness" are twinned by their matching endings, and the two abstractions balance on either side of "time" and "fur." The pairing is also funny. A grand, philosophical worry about mortality lands on something as mundane as shedding hair, which admits that the speaker's reasons are mixed: part existential dread, part reluctance to deal with the mess. "Muchness" is a slightly odd, childlike coinage, and it makes the dog's physical abundance feel almost excessive, too much creature for a tidy day.
Fur returns, in sound if not in sense, in the last line's "factory." The soft and the mechanical sit at opposite ends of the poem, and the speaker has chosen the factory. A factory suggests schedules, output and repetition, but what this one produces is "maybe." That is a sharp joke at the speaker's own expense, a life busy with possibilities and plans that never turn into anything definite. Set against it, the dog lives entirely in the present, all body and warmth. Even the final "maybe" seems to contain "may be," a phrase that holds the whole poem's uncertainty in two syllables.
The lone lowercase "o" in "o leave me to my life" sounds like a mock prayer, or a sigh. It addresses no one in particular, and it may be directed as much at time as at the dog. It is also not entirely convincing. A speaker truly at peace would not need to ask. Judging by the tone, the plea is half an excuse, and the speaker half knows it.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to flatter its speaker. It would be easy to write a tender poem about a dog, or a self-righteous one about a hard heart. Instead it records a small, ordinary act of avoidance, and it lets that act stand for the larger ways we keep life's brevity at a distance. It does this in forty-odd words, and the closed door at its centre leaves the reader on the wrong side of it, thinking about the dog.