The Pardon

           The poem “The Pardon” by Richard Wilbur reveals the transformation of a man who witnesses his dog’s death and who promptly loses both his desire for love and his recognition of death.  Wilbur’s use of an abbacddc rhyme scheme is written in In Memoriam stanza.  As the poem begins, the speaker addresses the death of his dog, and laments the fact that there is no grave for the dog with honeysuckle-vines.  Already, the speaker paints a morbid picture of the dog’s death with the “thick of summer” setting that the dog died in (line 2).  Yet, the speaker expresses the love that he only seemed to share for the dog when he was alive, and now has gone away – this idea can mirror the short, quick time of summer with the speaker’s eternal-less love for his dog.  Because the speaker is unable to accept the death of his dog he cannot accept the love for his dog any longer.  He comes into further realization of death in the second stanza especially when he “went only close enough…/to sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell” which was “twined with another odor heavier still” (lines 5, 6, 7).  The speaker comes to metaphorically “smell” the essence of death overcoming his dog. 

            In the third stanza, the speaker explains, “in my kind world the dead were out of range” (line 10).  He or she has never been exposed to the concept of death because he or she has been left in a world of childlike innocence.  This is until the speaker’s father “took the spade/And buried him” (lines 12, 13).  The short, sturdy sentence represents someone getting the job done quickly just as the quick nature of death scooping up the dog and just like that, burying him.  Regardless of whether the speaker wants to forget about death, or move beyond the realization of it towards his or her innocence again, the speaker realizes that “still he [will come]” (line 17).  The ending of the poem has the speaker resolve his feeling towards death more so as “mourn[ing] the dead” rather than being afraid of an inevitable fate (line 24).  I appreciate the poet’s technique of mirroring the aspects of death through the stanzas with the speaker’s slow, realization of death.  In a sense, I found the ending very sobering – the reader almost becomes sympathetic with the speaker because we too relate to our knowledge of the inevitability of death.