A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow (church of the toothless one, the county town of County Wicklow in Ireland) Also
Seamus Heaney
In memory of Donatus Nwoga
When human beings found out about death
They sent the dog to Chukwu (Chukwu is the source of all other Igbo deities, and is responsible for assigning them their different tasks. The Igbo people believe that all things come from Chukwu, who brings the rains necessary for plants to grow and controls everything on Earth and the spiritual world.) with a message:
They wanted to be let back to the house of life.
They didn’t want to end up lost forever
Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke
Or ashes that get blown away to nothing.
Instead they saw their souls in a flock at twilight
Cawing (the harsh cry of a rook, crow, or similar bird) and headed back to the same old roosts (nest, where birds rest)
And the same bright airs and wing-stretchings
Each morning.
Death would be like a night spent in the wood:
At first light they’d be back in the house of life.
(The dog was meant to tell all this to Chukwu.)
But death and human beings took second place
When he trotted off the path and started barking
At another dog in broad daylight just barking
Back at him from the far bank of a river.
And that is how the toad (وزغ) reached Chukwu first,
The toad who’d overheard in the beginning
What the dog was meant to tell.
‘Human beings,’ he said
(And here the toad was trusted absolutely),
‘Human beings want death to last forever.’
Then Chukwu saw the people’s souls in birds
Coming towards him like black spots off the sunset
To a place where there would be neither roosts
Not trees
Nor any way back to the house of life.
And his mind reddened and darkened (abashed!! & angry) all at once
And nothing that the dog would tell him later
Could change that vision. Great chiefs (leader or ruler of a clan) and great loves
In obliterated (When something is obliterated, it disappears or is so damaged, you can barely recognize it.) light, the toad in mud,
The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house.
Discussing the poem above, four questions are required to be answered based on Perrine, 673_676. The first one is who is the speaker? This poem is relating the story of Wicklow people and their reaction towards the knowledge of the nature of death from the point of view of a third person observer/ narrator. The second question is concerned with what the occasion is? So Wicklow people learn about death and they don’t find it pleasant to be lost forever, they feel the urge to ask Chukwu for an amelioration of death. They send a dog as the messenger, it gets distracted from its aim; thus a toad conveys the important message but turns everything upside down. The dog can’t undo what the toad did. Then everyone dies, including the toad and the dog. Afterwards comes what is the central purpose of the poem? The purpose of this poem is to tell the story of how by accident, death became so common though unpleasant part of life, although of course it is dramatized. The last question requires us to say by what means is that purpose achieved? The poem wants to say two things one is the unpleasant nature of death and the other is the unreliability of the messengers; to achieve these ends a scene is created where people get the unpleasant information and a messenger is assigned to convey the request to god, then an accidental natural distraction keeps the messenger from accomplishing its goal and the ending goes the opposite way of what people desired.
The image that comes to mind while reading this poem is simply like a village and ordinary folks all worried about death, and a dog running to the god stopping by a river to bark back at another dog, and a toad seeing the scene looking visions.
