Animals and Grief Theme Analysis

While Love That Dog is primarily the story of how protagonist Jack learns to love poetry, the poems that Jack writes himself tell another story: that of Jack’s relationship with his yellow dog, Sky. Through Jack and Sky’s story, Love That Dog highlights the strength of the bond between people and animals—and the immense grief that comes when a beloved pet dies. Both, the novel insists, are worth celebrating and talking about, even if (as Jack fears) it can sometimes be immensely sad to do so. This sadness permeates nearly all of Jack’s poems about Sky. His first poem explicitly about the dog, in which Jack and his dad go to an animal shelter to adopt Sky, describes dogs of various shapes and sizes in cages, leaping at the bars as though begging for someone to choose them. And in the poem’s final lines, Jack bluntly notes that the dogs nobody chooses to adopt will be euthanized. Jack implies that Sky is one of the lucky ones, but that it’s impossible to talk about Sky’s adoption without acknowledging all the other dogs that will die rather than be adopted. Then, after describing happy times playing with a ball in the street with Sky—and after several cryptic poems describing a speeding blue car splattered with mud—Jack reveals that the blue car is significant because it hit and killed Sky. Sky may have been lucky to be adopted, but Jack discovers that luck isn’t enough to protect a beloved pet from the dangers that lurk everywhere.

Interestingly, after writing his poem about Sky’s death, Jack tells his teacher, Miss Stretchberry, that he doesn’t want her to display the poem for the class—he fears it’s too sad to share. This suggests that some of Jack’s unwillingness to talk about losing Sky stems from a desire to protect others from uncomfortable emotions. However, Jack ultimately agrees to display his poem, and as a result, Jack’s demeanor change dramatically. Suddenly, Jack is no longer cryptic, vague, or surly. Instead, he’s focused entirely on his excitement about children’s author Walter Dean Myers’s upcoming visit to his classroom. This shift in Jack’s emotions and outlook suggests that he finds closure through sharing his and Sky’s story with an audience, which highlights the value of talking and writing about sad subjects. Doing so, the novel suggests, can help a person move on and process their grief in a healthy way.