The poem is a 24 line poem with 6 stanzas of 4 lines each. It seems to follow the rhyme scheme "abbacddc." The first three lines of the poem setup what the theme of the poem will be; death. He uses vivid imagery to describe how his dog had been dead for 5 days laying "...in a clump of pine/And a jungle of grass and honeysuckle vine." I like how in the next stanza Wilbur uses these images of "honeysuckle vine" to describe the different smells of that memory. These smells of remind the reader of life and death with sharp adjectives. "To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell/Twined with another heavy odor heavier still/And hear the flies' intolerable buzz." Also, by repeating the word using a form of heavy three times, the reader gets the sense the man in the poem is not quite over the loss of his dog, or still even something more, the acceptance of death.
Halfway through the poem, the man has a dream in which he sees his dog and it comes back to haunt him. In the end, he apologizes to Death and asks him for a pardon.
While beautiful as this poem is, I still have many questions about it. For example, to me a dog is a powerful thing to lose but I think if he were to find a dead body it would have been more powerful. Why not go that route? Also, why use this rhyme scheme? To me, it takes away from the heaviness that is the subject of death. It also makes the flow of the reading of it a little chunky. All in all, Richard Wilbur wrote a poem that is truly beautiful.
I think the impact of finding the dog dead as opposed to a human body was greater for the poet because the dog was his. It was a personal loss, which made the death more intimate. If he had to deal with a dead human body, the effect would be more scarring than intimate.
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