Explication of "Weighing the Dog"

This chapter in sound and sense talked about allegories and symbolism. The poem Weighing the Dog, by Billy Collins, uses both symbolism and allegory in a unique and interesting way. First off, the title itself is an allegory, it refers to both literally weighing the dog, as well as weighing the dogs importance in the speakers life.  Although it is the title this relationship is not clear until later in the poem. The speaker begins by telling readers his tactic for weighing the dog: "I hold him in my arms [...] / balancing our weight on the shaky blue scale" (Collins 2-3). Collins describes this in great detail, including everything down to the color of the scale. This shows how important this task is to the speaker and hints to the readers that it may be more than just weighing the dog in a literal sense.

The speaker then goes on to continue to describe his weighing of the dog: "I subtract my weight / from our total to find out the remainder that is his" (7-8). However this gives an even larger hint to the bigger image and how weighing the dog is actually a symbolic task. He comes to realize that he and the dog are combined because they have shared so many experiences and years together, he says that "I never figured out what you amounted to / until I subtracted myself from our combination" (11-12). This returns to the allegory because the speaker could be referring to one of two things, either he did not know the dogs weight until he subtracted his own or, he did not know how important the dog was to his identity until he separated the two.

The speaker comes to realize that him holding the dog in his arms while weighing him is symbolic of all of the times that his dog helped him through. He realizes that he used to be closer to his dog and more recently has become ungrateful and taken his dog for granted, in the last line of the poem the speaker says that he and the dog are lost without each other and are no longer alike. The speaker weighing the dog is symbolic to a person not knowing who they truly are until they are alone.