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Beauty in Death

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Submitted By lntaylor305
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The literary works, A Dog's Death and Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, are both great examples of the process of death. When you hear about death, it is not necessarily something that is beautiful or happy. There is a lot of grief when it comes to death, but there is also a lot of love. I think love and grief comes when death is around, whether it is for an animal or family member.
A Dog's Death talks about the death of a dog. They were not sure as to what had happened with the dog, they think that he may have been kicked or brushed by a car. They took the dog to the vet and the autopsy showed that she had a rupture in her liver. The dog had apparently been young and just learning to go potty on the newspaper. They tried to take the dog to the vet the next morning and in the car ride, she tried to bit her owner and had tied. The dog was only learning to live and yet she was already dying. The last act this dog had made was try and hide the diarrhea she didn't have any control over, she covered it with her newspaper.
What I found very intriguing about this poem, is that the dog was treated as if it were one of the family members. It is evident that the family who owned the dog, had no idea what had happened, but you can almost feel their pain (Sherwood, 2001). And that is exactly how the author wants you to feel. I can tell that the author wanted me to feel empathy for the family's loss. I felt myself really connecting to this story because, we owned a husky and we had to put him down because he was getting so old, he couldn't control his bladder anymore. The themes that they used in this poem was Love and Grief. Love, for the dog, because it was so young and had so much ahead of it's precious life, and it's life was cut, just like that. Grief is something the was portrayed very well in this poem. You can't help but feel grief for the family in this poem.

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