is reluctance to accept death. As a young ten-year-old, the loss of a dog would change the narrator's life significantly. Death something that he had never experienced before, and to make it worse, it was happening to and individual which he had loved and had grown extremely close to.The speaker openly tells us that he had been afraid. This fear that is instilled in him was the seed for his inability to find love not only in life, but in death as well. Because he knew nothing of death thus far in his life, he was so hurt by the loss of the dog that he stopped loving it. The narrator was unable to find it within himself to forgive anybody for taking his companion away from him, and at the same time, he went on to push away all affection and care in his life; "And I could not forgive the sad or strange in beast or man" (lines 11-12). In doing this, he was able to avoid dealing with the cruelty of death another time. There was no room inside of him to forgive for all of the pain that he had to carry. From the point that his father "took the spade and buried [the dog]" (lines 12-13), the narrator began to live his life stoically and plainly, never stopping for love or to enjoy his years. This is apparent because at the end of the poem we will see that he expresses his remorse for his past, and longs to mourn and love once again.At this point, the poem takes a turn. After devoting so much time to such an unfulfilling life, the narrator dreams that he is once again at the revolting scene of his dog's rotting corpse and burial. He again perceives the reincarnated dog as a symbol of death as a part of life, but as an older and more mature man, he now begins to accept it instead of pushing it away. True, he confesses fear once again in lines 16-17 ("I confess I felt afraid again"), but at this point, he understands the importance. Instead of seeing just a carcass laying dead in a clump of pine trees, there is life within the beast, ...
