The Man
by Michael Stewart
The Man took Dog from his den.
First he castrated him,
then he caged him,
put a noose around his neck,
chopped his tail off,
pinned his ears,
shaved off his fur,
forbade him to hunt
and instead taught
him to play
dead, sit up and beg,
fetch a ball, fetch a
stick, fetch a frizbee.
He gave him a name,
expected him to come
when he shouted it,
tossed him scraps from his table.
If Dog barked too much
or if he didn’t bark enough
The Man whipped Dog.
Dog looked around at his lot,
were he to leave the man
he had nowhere to go,
no source of food
and no shelter.
There was no way back
to the place
he’d come from.
He had no choice:
now he loved
THE MAN
I worked with Michael Stewart on literary events and on two anthologies from Grist Books between 2021 and 2024. Fitting, then, that my first exposure to The Dogs should come at an event, where artist Louis Benoit’s paintings and sculptures (included throughout the book) filled the gallery and Stewart read from his book – flanked by his own dog. The whole experience was brought to life by Benoit’s unsettling art and Stewart’s powerful reading.
The Dogs is a fascinating collection. On the back of the book, poet Steve Ely states that ‘Stewart has done for Dog what Ted Hughes did for Crow’ and that hits the nail on the head more than any blurb, review or press release ever could. The book moves in three parts. The first tells the history of dogs, the second examines their place in the modern day, and the third narrates a futuristic world where dogs rebel against humans, both peacefully and violently, in a battle for rights. Our poem of the month, ‘The Man’, is the closing poem from the book’s first section.
The first thing that stands out in ‘The Man’ (and in the whole collection) is that Dog is often capitalised. In making it a proper noun, he makes Dog a mythical, time transcendent being akin to Hughes' Crow. But this also allows Stewart's Dog to speak for all dogs and, further, all animals tamed and bred and abused by humans. As Stewart states in the introduction, ‘This… is a book about dogs, but it is also a book about us’. He holds up a mirror to humanity throughout this collection – humanity in the distant past, the present day, and the coming future – and he forces us to look at our reflection. And just like Benoit’s art, that reflected is distorted, frightening, unsettling, haunting.
The Man is also capitalised throughout. The only exception, interestingly, is when Dog thinks of the man at the poem’s end. There, in the mind of Dog, we are reduced. But throughout, the capitalisation makes humanity a collective. It presents a shared responsibility. A shared guilt. A shared need to do better with the animals of our earth.
Then come the actions of The Man, listed one after another. Some of them don't seem too cruel. After all, The Man taught Dog to "fetch a ball. Fetch a / stick. Fetch a frizbee". This is play, isn't it? Dogs love play. My dog does. What's wrong with that?
Nothing, with the modern dog. But when we're examining the history, this poem shows us that we bred dogs to do these very things. You wouldn't play fetch with a wolf, would you? But that's what we've done. We've changed their very psychological makeup for our own entertainment. Specifying ‘stick’ and ‘frisbee’ emphasises the ridiculousness – we have bred an animal trained to live in a pack and hunt into a creature that chases a frisbee across the neat cut grass of the local park. The cruelty is still here, but it is subtle. Dogs now know no better. But this poem shows us the glaring difference between the lives they should be able to live, and the lives they do live. At least, the best-case scenario of a dog’s life. After all, not every dog is loved, given shelter, given food, given play. My own dog, Angus, was a rescue. Before we even met him, he already, at five months old, had had a broken leg that required pins for the rest of his life.
The cruelty is more glaringly obvious when Stewart lists some of the harsher treatment of The Man toward Dog:
First he castrated him,
then he caged him,
put a noose around his neck,
chopped his tail off,
pinned his ears,
shaved off his fur,
forbade him to hunt
There is a clear violence to this. A dominance. ‘Castrated’, ‘chopped’, ‘caged’ and ‘noose’ particularly connote punishment – all four of them are associated with criminal sentences and execution: prison, execution by sword, execution by hanging, punishment via castration (often reserved for homosexuality, with Alan Turing being the most famous example). Yet we are oddly comfortable doing this to an animal. Through this, Stewart deftly exposes cruelty to dogs, to pets, while opening up further questions about the ethics of the meat industry. This association between The Man’s treatment of Dog and punishment continues when Dog is later ‘whipped’ for barking too much. Or for barking too little.
It is the second stanza I find to be the most illuminating, however - 'He had no choice: / now he loved // THE MAN'. Forced love, forced obedience. Punishment and dominance. This isn't a poem that's just about humanity's treatment of animals. This is a poem about humanity's treatment of each other. Particularly, The Man and his treatment toward The Woman.
In a field known as ecofeminism, scholars craft “a theoretical discourse whose theme is the link between the oppression of woman and the domination of nature.”¹ In sum, man’s treatment of nature – the exploitation and ruin committed upon the natural world – is aligned with the patriarchy, sexism and misogyny in the present day and throughout all of human history.
And it's hard not to read ‘The Man’ through this lens. It's hard not to see the treatment of women in The Man's treatment of Dog, which simultaneously reinforces the disrespect men have toward women, and the disregard those in power (usually corrupt, rich men) have toward the environment.
In a day where young boys are seduced into the manosphere, wildfires are bursting across the countryside, and the cruelty of the farming industry is at an all-time high, Stewart's poem exposes cruelty and the systems that uphold them.