The Analysis of a Poetry - Billy Collins’s "Weighing the Dog"

  After the final exam, I read some poems and write down my reflections and analyses. Although this poem's title is "Weighing the Dog", in fact the speakers talked about a broken relationship between the speakers and his lover. At first, I tried to use my imagination to figure out what the true meaning behind the literal words and phrase was, but I still did not make sense of the poem. Because it was really confusing and nonsensical that the author clearly narrated about the process of weighing the dog. It must have a real implication behind these simple phrases. Therefore, I tried to be the speakers in this poem,and I gradually grasped the general idea of this poem, but I do not still understand the detailed points in this poem.


Weighing the Dog
It is awkward for me and bewildering for him
as I hold him in my arms in the small bathroom,
balancing our weight on the shaky blue scale,

but this is the way to weigh a dog and easier
than training him to sit obediently on one spot
with his tongue out, waiting for the cookie.

With pencil and paper I subtract my weight
from our total to find out the remainder that is his,
and I start to wonder if there is an analogy here.

It could not have to do with my leaving you
though I never figured out what you amounted to
until I subtracted myself from our combination.

You held me in your arms more than I held you
through all those awkward and bewildering months
and now we are both lost in strange and distant neighborhoods.

Billy Collins (b. 1941)

  In Billy Collins’s Weighing the Dog, he conveyed a much deeper concept than simply weighing a dog. It talked about a broken relationship. The dog symbolized his lover. The first and the second stanza – “It is awkward for me and bewildering for him as I hold him in my arms in the small bathroom, balancing our weight on the shaky blue scale, but this is the way to weigh a dog and easier than training him to sit obediently on one spot with his tongue out, waiting for the cookie.” The speaker, on using the method with the dog, he found an analogy to his lover. When they were together, he could easier measure his lover’s love just like training the dog to sit obediently on one spot with his tongue out, waiting for the cookie. I think when they were together, the girl was willing to do everything for the speaker, and then she might just expect a love from him in return just like the dog. However, after separating with the girl, the speaker discovered her significant and the distance between them; thereby he might say “It is awkward for me...” The lover’s affection or heart was far away from the speaker, so the speaker used the metaphor to describe that nowadays when he wanted to know the dog’s weight, he needed to takes the awkward method. Their relationship was not as close as before, and the speaker thought he could not gradually understand and feel his lover’s affection as easily as yesterday. Collins talked about in the third stanza – “With pencil and paper I subtract my weight from our total to find out the remainder that is his, and I start to wonder if there is an analogy here”, it means that only when he ignored himself did he realize how important his lover was. In the fourth stanza – “It could not have to do with my leaving you though I never figured out what you amounted to until I subtracted myself from our combination”, the speaker never realized the girl’s value until he started to leave; by that he just knew what the girl had contributed to their relationship.