Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marie Howe’s "Buddy" explores the dissonance between language and experience, using the figure of a dog to highlight the fundamental human struggle with loss and memory. The poem opens with a seemingly ordinary scene: "Andy sees us to the door, and Buddy is suddenly all over him, leaping and barking because Andy said: walk." The dog, Buddy, responds immediately to a word that signifies an action he anticipates with excitement. However, this moment quickly turns into a meditation on meaning itself, as the speaker notes: "Are you going to walk home? he said. To me. And Buddy thinks him and now, and he’s wrong." Here, Buddy’s misunderstanding—his assumption that "walk" means an immediate action rather than an abstract possibility—becomes the focal point of the poem’s philosophical inquiry.

The speaker contrasts Buddy’s literal understanding with human perception: "He doesn’t understand the difference between sign and symbol like we do—the thing and the word for the thing." This distinction, while seemingly simple, carries profound implications, particularly in the realm of grief and memory. Humans, unlike Buddy, can talk about something that is absent, can invoke a presence through language even when the physical entity is no longer there. The phrase "the way I talk about John" signals the deeper emotional undercurrent of the poem. John, presumably a lost loved one, exists now only in the realm of words, in the speaker’s recollections. Buddy, bound to the immediate world, cannot comprehend this abstract notion of presence; he believes words must correspond to real, tangible events.

The poem then moves toward a meditation on time and expectation: "Andy meant: soon. He meant me. As for Buddy, Andy meant: later. When he was good and ready, he said." The confusion between now and later becomes emblematic of the broader tension between anticipation and reality, a theme that parallels the speaker’s relationship to memory. Grief often functions in the same way as Buddy’s misunderstanding—it fixates on the presence of absence, waiting for something that will never arrive in the way it once did.

The poem’s final lines reinforce this idea: "Buddy doesn’t understand. He’s in a state of agitation and grief, scratching at the door." The dog’s reaction mirrors the human experience of loss, his physical response embodying an emotional state that, for people, manifests internally. The closing observation—"If one of us said, Andy, when Andy wasn’t there, that silly Buddy would probably jump up barking and begin looking for him."—underscores the way names hold power. Just as Buddy expects Andy to materialize upon hearing his name, the speaker understands that saying John brings back a presence that is not truly there, only summoned through memory.

Ultimately, "Buddy" is a poignant meditation on the limits of language in the face of loss. The poem suggests that, much like Buddy searching for Andy, the speaker continues to reach for John through words, aware of their insufficiency yet unable to stop invoking him. In contrasting the instinctual immediacy of the dog with the reflective consciousness of the speaker, Howe articulates the quiet agony of grief—its reliance on words, its inability to reconcile the gap between the past and the present, and its restless, persistent searching.

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