Man’s best friend. An always faithful ally.
Whether the dog is domesticated as a pet and there to enjoy life with a family or as a work-dog herding sheep, helping to hunt, police or guard, the dog has proved time and time again to have many invaluable uses.
They come in all shapes and sizes from sought after breeds to lowly mongrels each with an array of qualities that give them distinct personalities.
From earliest times dogs have been able to find a unique place fulfilling the needs of their keepers and often there is equal devotion from master to servant. A dog’s life no longer has to have negative connotations as so many pooches are loved, extravagantly fed, groomed, petted and pawed over, all perhaps more than our fellow man.
Dogs were even worshipped as deities in Mesopotamian times and across several cultures and civilisations including Hindu, Chinese and Greek, they are the helpers, the watchers or guardians of sacred or sensitive sites.
Between then and now poets have written verse, both serious and humorous, in attempts to keep a poetic track both of feelings and as a tribute to our four-legged friends and their adventures.
1 - The Poetry of Dogs - An Introduction
2 - A Friendly Welcome by Lord Byron
3 - A Popular Personage At Home by Thomas Hardy
4 - The Power of the Dog by Rudyard Kiping
5 - Verse for a Certain Dog by Dorothy Parker
6 - The Best Friend by Meribah Abbott
7 - The Joy of a Dog by Edgar Albert Guest
8 - Dog by Harold Munro
9 - My Comforter by Anonymous
10 - Four Feet. 'The Woman in His Life' by Rudyard Kipling
11 - The Dog and His Master by Anne Kingsmill-Finch
12 - Little Lost Pup by Arthur Guiterman
13 - A Little Dog That Wags His Tail by Emily Dickinson
14 - The Hairy Dog by Herbert Asquith
15 - Dogs and Weather by Winifred Welles
16 - Incident. Charactristic of a Favourite Dog Which Belonged to a Friend of the Author by William Wordsworth
17 - Confessions of a Glutton by Don Marquis
18 - The Fable of the Shepherd and Wolf by John Gay
19 - On a Spaniel Called 'Beau', Killing a Young Bird by William Cowper
20 - Beau's Reply by William Cowper
21 - Contentment by Burges Johnson wav
22 - The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog by Anonymous
23 - The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat by Eugene Field
24 - How the Feud Started by Arthur Guiterman
25 - Tray by Robert Browning
26 - The Dog and the Water Lily. No Fable by William Cowper
27 - The Irish Greyhound by Katherine Phillips
28 - The Fable of the Mastiff by John Gay
29 - The Dog in the Manger by Aphra Behn
30 - Towser, A True Tale, 20th July 1806 by Robert Tannahill
31 - The Dog of St Bernard's by Caroline Fry Wilson
32 - Sonnet - To Tartar, A Terrier Beauty by Thomas Lovell Beddoes
33 - Tobias's Dog by Mary Howitt
34 - I Started Early – Took my Dog by Emily Dickinson
35 - Canis Major by Robert Frost
36 - Man and Dog by Edward Thomas
37 - Dog Days by Amy Lowell
38 - So This Is How I Turned into a Dog by Vladamir Mayakovsky
39 - The Dogs by Arthur Symons
40 - To a Black Greyhound by Julian Grenfell
41 - An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog by Oliver Goldsmith
42 - The Dog Tupman by Stella Benson
43 - Upon His Spaniel Tracy by Robert Herrick
44 - To Rollo by Kenneth Grahame
45 - Ruby by Edward Lear
46 - To Flush, My Dog by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
47 - Kaiser Dead by Matthew Arnold
48 - Epitaph to a Dog by Lord Byron
49 - Last Words To A Dumb Friend by Thomas Hardy
(Tags : The Poetry of Dogs Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Hardy & Emily Dickinson Audiobook, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Hardy & Emily Dickinson Audio CD )
