Pet Loss Poems: 8 That Help When Nothing Else Does

Pet loss poems do one narrow, useful thing. They hand you language at the exact moment yours has stopped working. What follows is eight of them, printed in full, sorted by the situation you’re standing in rather than by who wrote them or when.

That sorting is the part most lists skip. The poem that holds up at a graveside is rarely the one that helps at three in the morning when the house has gone wrong, and you’re listening for a sound that isn’t coming. A poem for a person who just told you it was only a dog is a different poem again. Reading through twenty of them looking for the right one is work, and you’re not in a state to do work.

So each poem below comes with the moment it fits. Every one is old enough to be out of copyright, which means you can read it at a service, print it on a card, put it in a caption, or carve it into something, and nobody can tell you not to.

If you came here for the Rainbow Bridge, it has its own section. We don’t reprint it, and there’s a reason for that, along with the story of the nineteen-year-old in Scotland who actually wrote it and went sixty-four years without her name on it.

Key Takeaways

• All eight poems here are public domain, so you can read them aloud, print them, or engrave them without permission or attribution problems.
• Match the poem to the moment. Byron’s epitaph is built to be read standing up at a burial. Hardy’s cat poem is for the day you can’t make yourself throw the bowl away.
• The Rainbow Bridge was written in 1959 by Edna Clyne-Rekhy, a teenager in Inverness, for her Labrador Major. She was not identified until 2023, and the poem is still under copyright.
• Neruda’s “A Dog Has Died” and Kipling’s “Four-Feet” are both still protected. We link to authorized copies rather than reprinting them.
• Writing your own poem works even if you have never written one. Name one specific thing, not the whole animal.

How to Choose a Pet Loss Poem for the Moment You’re In

Pick by what you need the poem to do, not by which poet you recognize. A poem is a tool with a fairly narrow application, and the wrong one at the wrong hour makes things worse. Reading a hopeful reunion poem to someone in the first raw week can come across as telling them to cheer up.

Here is the whole set, mapped to the situation:

• Standing at a burial or a service, needing something to say out loud: Byron’s “Epitaph to a Dog.”
• Somebody has just implied your grief is out of proportion: Matthew Arnold’s “Geist’s Grave,” which spends eighty lines on that exact question.
• Their bowl is still by the door, and you can’t move it: Thomas Hardy’s “Last Words to a Dumb Friend.”
• The house sounds wrong, and you keep half-hearing them: Hardy’s “Dead ‘Wessex’ the Dog to the Household.”
• You’re wondering whether you could ever do this again: Kipling’s “The Power of the Dog.”
• Your pet was not a dog or a cat, and nothing you’ve found fits: Cowper’s “Epitaph on a Hare.”
• You lost a horse: Edward Dyson’s “The Old Whim Horse.”
• You need ten minutes of not crying: Thomas Gray’s mock-elegy for a cat who drowned chasing goldfish.

Read the section, not just the poem. Each one below comes with what it’s doing and why it works where it works, because a poem you understand does more than a poem you merely like the sound of.

A Poem to Read Aloud at a Burial or Memorial Service

Byron’s “Epitaph to a Dog” is the one to read standing up. He wrote it in November 1808 for Boatswain, his Newfoundland, who died of rabies at Newstead Abbey. Byron nursed him through it. The tomb he built for the dog is larger than the poet’s own grave at Hucknall, and it’s still standing.

It works aloud because it was written to be carved and read by strangers walking past. It has the cadence of something said rather than something thought. And it’s angry, which most memorial verse isn’t, so it gives people who arrive at a burial a place to put that fury rather than their tears.

One correction worth having, because nearly every site gets it wrong. The famous opening prose, the “Beauty without Vanity” part, isn’t Byron’s. His friend John Cam Hobhouse wrote it. Byron wrote the verse. If you’re reading this at a service and someone asks, that’s the answer.

Lord Byron, “Epitaph to a Dog” (1809)

Near this Spot
are deposited the Remains of one
who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferosity,
and all the virtues of Man without his Vices.
This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery
if inscribed over human Ashes,
is but a just tribute to the Memory of
BOATSWAIN, a DOG,
who was born in Newfoundland May 1803
and died at Newstead Nov. 18th, 1808.

When some proud Son of Man returns to Earth,
Unknown to Glory but upheld by Birth,
The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below:
When all is done, upon the Tomb is seen
Not what he was, but what he should have been.
But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his Master’s own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour’d falls, unnotic’d all his worth,
Deny’d in heaven the Soul he held on earth:
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.
Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debas’d by slavery, or corrupt by power,
Who knows thee well, must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who behold perchance this simple urn,
Pass on, it honors none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one—and here he lies.

Prose inscription by John Cam Hobhouse. Verse by George Gordon, Lord Byron, first published 1809. Public domain.

The last line is the one people remember, and it’s the one to end on if you’re cutting for time. Read only the final six lines, and it still lands. If you’re putting together the wider shape of the day, our guide to planning a pet memorial service covers the order of things and who says what.

When Someone Tells You It Was Just an Animal

Matthew Arnold buried a dachshund named Geist, dead at four, and then wrote eighty lines arguing with himself about whether that much grief was reasonable for four years of a small dog. He concludes that it was. That argument, conducted in public by a serious Victorian critic, is why this poem is the right one to hand to somebody who has just been told to get over it.

What pet parents tell us, over and over, is that the hardest part is rarely the loss itself. It’s the second conversation, the one where a colleague asks whether you’re getting another one yet. Arnold got there first and took the question seriously.

Watch what he does in the fifth and sixth stanzas. He grants the whole objection, the smallness of the animal and the shortness of the life, and then says that not all the centuries to come and not the entire inventive capacity of nature can produce that specific dog again. That is the argument. It isn’t sentiment. It’s a claim about how particular a creature is.

Matthew Arnold, “Geist’s Grave” (1881)

Four years!—and didst thou stay above
The ground, which hides thee now, but four?
And all that life, and all that love,
Were crowded, Geist! into no more?

Only four years those winning ways,
Which make me for thy presence yearn,
Call’d us to pet thee or to praise,
Dear little friend! at every turn?

That loving heart, that patient soul,
Had they indeed no longer span,
To run their course, and reach their goal,
And read their homily to man?

That liquid, melancholy eye,
From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs
Seem’d surging the Virgilian cry,
The sense of tears in mortal things—

That steadfast, mournful strain, consoled
By spirits gloriously gay,
And temper of heroic mould—
What, was four years their whole short day?

Yes, only four!—and not the course
Of all the centuries yet to come,
And not the infinite resource
Of Nature, with her countless sum

Of figures, with her fulness vast
Of new creation evermore,
Can ever quite repeat the past,
Or just thy little self restore.

Stern law of every mortal lot!
Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear,
And builds himself I know not what
Of second life I know not where.

But thou, when struck thine hour to go,
On us, who stood despondent by,
A meek last glance of love didst throw,
And humbly lay thee down to die.

Yet would we keep thee in our heart—
Would fix our favorite on the scene,
Nor let thee utterly depart
And be as if thou ne’er hadst been.

And so there rise these lines of verse
On lips that rarely form them now;
While to each other we rehearse:
Such ways, such arts, such looks hadst thou!

We stroke thy broad brown paws again,
We bid thee to thy vacant chair,
We greet thee by the window-pane,
We hear thy scuffle on the stair.

We see the flaps of thy large ears
Quick raised to ask which way we go;
Crossing the frozen lake, appears
Thy small black figure on the snow!

Nor to us only art thou dear
Who mourn thee in thine English home;
Thou hast thine absent master’s tear,
Dropt by the far Australian foam.

Thy memory lasts both here and there,
And thou shalt live as long as we.
And after that—thou dost not care!
In us was all the world to thee.

Yet, fondly zealous for thy fame,
Even to a date beyond our own
We strive to carry down thy name,
By mounded turf, and graven stone.

We lay thee, close within our reach,
Here, where the grass is smooth and warm,
Between the holly and the beech,
Where oft we watch’d thy couchant form,

Asleep, yet lending half an ear
To travellers on the Portsmouth road;—
There build we thee, O guardian dear,
Mark’d with a stone, thy last abode!

Then some, who through this garden pass,
When we too, like thyself, are clay,
Shall see thy grave upon the grass,
And stop before the stone, and say:

People who lived here long ago
Did by this stone, it seems, intend
To name for future times to know
The dachs-hound, Geist, their little friend.

Matthew Arnold, “Geist’s Grave,” first published in the Fortnightly Review, January 1881. Public domain.

The line to keep is “In us was all the world to thee.” It’s the plainest statement anyone has made of why this loss isn’t small. You were the entire world of a creature, and now that world has no one in it. If the people around you are the problem rather than the grief, our section on pet loss grief and emotions deals with the disenfranchised kind, where the loss is real, and the permission to mourn it never arrives.

When You Can’t Bring Yourself to Put Their Things Away

Thomas Hardy lost a cat in 1904 and dated the poem he wrote for her the second of October. It is the least consoling thing in this entire list, and it’s the one people come back to.

He starts by swearing off animals forever. Then he gives instructions: sweep the fur off the chair, rake out the little paths the cat wore through the bushes, scrape the claw marks off the pine bark. Better a blank house than a house full of evidence. He calls it “contrived forgetfulness,” and he is completely clear-eyed about what he is attempting.

Then he can’t do it. The poem’s last stanza has him at the window looking at the small mound under the tree where the cat used to play. The plan fails within the poem itself, which is the whole point.

Around here, Baxter’s water bowl stayed by the back door for eleven days. Everybody knows the feeling of walking around an object you can’t pick up.

Thomas Hardy, “Last Words to a Dumb Friend” (1922)

Pet was never mourned as you,
Purrer of the spotless hue,
Plumy tail, and wistful gaze
While you humoured our queer ways,
Or outshrilled your morning call
Up the stairs and through the hall—
Foot suspended in its fall—
While, expectant, you would stand
Arched, to meet the stroking hand;
Till your way you chose to wend
Yonder, to your tragic end.

Never another pet for me!
Let your place all vacant be;
Better blankness day by day
Than companion torn away.
Better bid his memory fade,
Better blot each mark he made,
Selfishly escape distress
By contrived forgetfulness,
Than preserve his prints to make
Every morn and eve an ache.

From the chair whereon he sat
Sweep his fur, nor wince thereat;
Rake his little pathways out
Mid the bushes roundabout;
Smooth away his talons’ mark
From the claw-worn pine-tree bark,
Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,
Waiting us who loitered round.

Strange it is this speechless thing,
Subject to our mastering,
Subject for his life and food
To our gift, and time, and mood;
Timid pensioner of us Powers,
His existence ruled by ours,
Should—by crossing at a breath
Into safe and shielded death,
By the merely taking hence
Of his insignificance—
Loom as largened to the sense,
Shape as part, above man’s will,
Of the Imperturbable.

As a prisoner, flight debarred,
Exercising in a yard,
Still retain I, troubled, shaken,
Mean estate, by him forsaken;
And this home, which scarcely took
Impress from his little look,
By his faring to the Dim
Grows all eloquent of him.

Housemate, I can think you still
Bounding to the window-sill,
Over which I vaguely see
Your small mound beneath the tree,
Showing in the autumn shade
That you moulder where you played.

Thomas Hardy, “Last Words to a Dumb Friend,” first published in Late Lyrics and Earlier, 1922. Public domain.

Notice what he never does. There is no reunion, no better place, no suggestion that the cat is anywhere at all. The comfort on offer is only that somebody else found this unbearable in exactly the way you’re finding it unbearable, and wrote it down in 1904. For some people that’s worth more than any promise. Nobody has to move anything before they’re ready, and rituals for honoring a pet work with the objects rather than against them.

When the House Still Sounds Like Them

Hardy again, twenty-four years later, and this time the dog is doing the talking. Wessex was his wire-haired fox terrier, famously awful to guests, and the poem appeared posthumously in 1928, months after Hardy himself died that January.

The dead dog asks whether the household still thinks of him, still looks for him on the hill path at walking time. Then he tells them the truth. They may hear a jump or a trot on the stair. It will not be him. And if they call, he will not come.

Reach for this one at the stage where you keep mishearing things. It doesn’t argue you out of it. It confirms that the sound is real, that other people in other centuries have heard it too, and that it isn’t the animal. Some readers find that devastating and some find it settling, and which one you are probably depends on the week you’re having.

Thomas Hardy, “Dead ‘Wessex’ the Dog to the Household” (1928)

Do you think of me at all,
    Wistful ones?
Do you think of me at all
    As if nigh?
Do you think of me at all
At the creep of evenfall,
Or when the sky-birds call
    As they fly?

Do you look for me at times,
    Wistful ones?
Do you look for me at times
    Strained and still?
Do you look for me at times,
When the hour for walking chimes,
On that grassy path that climbs
    Up the hill?

You may hear a jump or trot,
    Wistful ones,
You may hear a jump or trot—
    Mine, as ’twere—
You may hear a jump or trot
On the stair or path or plot;
But I shall cause it not,
    Be not there.

Should you call as when I knew you,
    Wistful ones,
Should you call as when I knew you,
    Shared your home;
Should you call as when I knew you,
I shall not turn to view you,
I shall not listen to you,
    Shall not come.

Thomas Hardy, “Dead ‘Wessex’ the Dog to the Household,” first published in Winter Words, 1928. Public domain.

The repetition is doing the work. Each stanza opens the same phrase three times, the way a thought loops when you can’t put it down. Hardy built the shape of the obsession into the poem, which is why reading it feels less like being told something and more like being recognized.

When You’re Wondering Whether to Love Another One

Kipling’s “The Power of the Dog” is an argument against ever getting a dog, delivered by a man who plainly kept getting dogs. He lays out the arithmetic without softening it. Fourteen years if you’re lucky, then asthma or a tumor or fits, then the vet’s unspoken prescription. You knew the ending when you started.

Then the last stanza breaks his own case. Loves are not given but only lent, he says, at compound interest, and a short-term loan comes due just as hard as a long one. That is the honest answer to the person who tells you it was only two years so it should hurt less.

People reach for this poem at two moments: right after, when they want somebody to acknowledge the size of the bill, and months later, when a friend has started sending them shelter listings.

Rudyard Kipling, “The Power of the Dog” (1909)

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie—
Perfect passion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart for a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet’s unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find—it’s your own affair—
But…you’ve given your heart for a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!);
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone—wherever it goes—for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart for the dog to tear.

We’ve sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we’ve kept ’em, the more do we grieve:
For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short-time loan is as bad as a long—
So why in Heaven (before we are there)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

Rudyard Kipling, “The Power of the Dog,” first collected in Actions and Reactions, 1909. Public domain.

A warning on the third stanza. The language about lethal chambers and loaded guns is 1909 veterinary reality and it can hit hard if the decision you made was recent. Skip that stanza if you’re reading this aloud to anyone, or if you’re not sure how you’ll do with it yourself.

When Your Pet Wasn’t a Dog or a Cat

Almost every poem in this genre assumes a dog. If you lost a rabbit, a rat, a bird, a horse, a guinea pig, or something with scales, the whole literature can feel like it was written for a club you were not in.

William Cowper kept three hares. When Tiney died in March 1783, he wrote an epitaph that’s still the best poem about an unglamorous animal in English, and it works because Cowper refuses to pretend the hare was nice. Tiney was surly. He took his food with a suspicious look and bit when he could. He was, in the poem’s flat phrase, “still a wild Jack-hare” after eight years of domestic life.

Cowper puts inventory in place of sentiment. Wheaten bread, milk, oats, straw, thistles, lettuce, sand to scour his stomach. Hawthorn twigs. The russet peel of apples. Sliced carrot when the salad ran out. A Turkey carpet he liked to bound across. That specificity is the love, and anyone who has kept an animal most people find unremarkable will recognize the method immediately.

William Cowper, “Epitaph on a Hare” (1784)

Here lies, whom hound did ne’er pursue,
Nor swifter greyhound follow,
Whose foot ne’er tainted morning dew,
Nor ear heard huntsman’s hallo’,

Old Tiney, surliest of his kind,
Who, nurs’d with tender care,
And to domestic bounds confin’d,
Was still a wild Jack-hare.

Though duly from my hand he took
His pittance ev’ry night,
He did it with a jealous look,
And, when he could, would bite.

His diet was of wheaten bread,
And milk, and oats, and straw,
Thistles, or lettuces instead,
With sand to scour his maw.

On twigs of hawthorn he regal’d,
On pippins’ russet peel;
And, when his juicy salads fail’d,
Slic’d carrot pleas’d him well.

A Turkey carpet was his lawn,
Whereon he lov’d to bound,
To skip and gambol like a fawn,
And swing his rump around.

His frisking was at evening hours,
For then he lost his fear;
But most before approaching show’rs,
Or when a storm drew near.

Eight years and five round-rolling moons
He thus saw steal away,
Dozing out all his idle noons,
And ev’ry night at play.

I kept him for his humour’ sake,
For he would oft beguile
My heart of thoughts that made it ache,
And force me to a smile.

But now, beneath this walnut-shade
He finds his long, last home,
And waits, in snug concealment laid,
‘Till gentler Puss shall come.

He, still more aged, feels the shocks
From which no care can save,
And, partner once of Tiney’s box,
Must soon partake his grave.

William Cowper, “Epitaph on a Hare,” written March 1783, first printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1784. Public domain.

The ninth stanza is the one to read twice. Cowper says he kept the animal for his humor’s sake, because the hare would beguile his heart of thoughts that made it ache and force him to smile. Cowper suffered severe depression for most of his adult life. He is saying, quietly and without making a production of it, that a bad-tempered hare was part of what kept him going.

A Poem for a Horse

Losing a horse sits oddly in the pet loss world. The animal is enormous, the relationship is often built around work rather than the couch, the practical aftermath is a different order of problem, and people who have never been around horses tend to assume the bond is smaller. It isn’t.

Edward Dyson published “The Old Whim Horse” in the Sydney Bulletin in July 1892. The horse in it worked a whim, the circular winding gear that hauled ore up a mine shaft, walking the same ring for years. When the mine plays out, everyone leaves. The horse is turned loose in the gully because there’s no market for his bones and skin, and he keeps coming back to the ring at shift time.

Then one night the mine comes back for him. He hears the stampers going in the ruined mill, sees the lights in the roofless huts, hears his driver singing. He takes his place on the ring, feels the strain on his shoulder, works his shift, and dies walking the circle.

Edward Dyson, “The Old Whim Horse” (1892)

He’s an old grey horse, with his head bowed sadly,
And with dim old eyes and a queer roll aft,
With the off-fore sprung and the hind screwed badly,
And he bears all over the brands of graft;
And he lifts his head from the grass to wonder
Why by night and day the whim is still,
Why the silence is, and the stampers’ thunder
Sounds forth no more from the shattered mill.

In that whim he worked when the night winds bellowed
On the riven summit of Giant’s Hand,
And by day when prodigal Spring had yellowed
All the wide, long sweep of enchanted land;
And he knew his shift, and the whistle’s warning,
And he knew the calls of the boys below;
Through the years, unbidden, at night or morning,
He had taken his stand by the old whim bow.

But the whim stands still, and the wheeling swallow
In the silent shaft hangs her home of clay,
And the lizards flirt and the swift snakes follow
O’er the grass-grown brace in the summer day;
And the corn springs high in the cracks and corners
Of the forge, and down where the timber lies;
And the crows are perched like a band of mourners
On the broken hut on the Hermit’s Rise.

All the hands have gone, for the rich reef paid out,
And the company waits till the calls come in;
But the old grey horse, like the claim, is played out,
And no market’s near for his bones and skin.
So they let him live, and they left him grazing
By the creek, and oft in the evening dim
I have seen him stand on the rises, gazing
At the ruined brace and the rotting whim.

The floods rush high in the gully under,
And the lightnings lash at the shrinking trees,
Or the cattle down from the ranges blunder
As the fires drive by on the summer breeze.
Still the feeble horse at the right hour wanders
To the lonely ring, though the whistle’s dumb,
And with hanging head by the bow he ponders
Where the whim boy’s gone—why the shifts don’t come.

But there comes a night when he sees lights glowing
In the roofless huts and the ravaged mill,
When he hears again all the stampers going—
Though the huts are dark and the stampers still:
When he sees the steam to the black roof clinging
As its shadows roll on the silver sands,
And he knows the voice of his driver singing.
And the knocker’s clang where the braceman stands.

See the old horse take, like a creature dreaming,
On the ring once more his accustomed place;
But the moonbeams full on the ruins streaming
Show the scattered timbers and grass-grown brace.
Yet he hears the sled in the smithy falling,
And the empty truck as it rattles back,
And the boy who stands by the anvil, calling;
And he turns and backs, and he “takes up slack.”

While the old drum creaks, and the shadows shiver
As the wind sweeps by, and the hut doors close,
And the bats dip down in the shaft or quiver
In the ghostly light, round the grey horse goes;
And he feels the strain on his untouched shoulder,
Hears again the voice that was dear to him,
Sees the form he knew—and his heart grows bolder
As he works his shift by the broken whim.

He hears in the sluices the water rushing
As the buckets drain and the doors fall back;
When the early dawn in the east is blushing,
He is limping still round the old, old track.
Now he pricks his ears, with a neigh replying
To a call unspoken, with eyes aglow,
And he sways and sinks in the circle, dying;
From the ring no more will the grey horse go.

In a gully green, where a dam lies gleaming,
And the bush creeps back on a worked-out claim,
And the sleepy crows in the sun sit dreaming
On the timbers grey and a charred hut frame,
Where the legs slant down, and the hare is squatting
In the high rank grass by the dried-up course,
Nigh a shattered drum and a king-post rotting
Are the bleaching bones of the old grey horse.

Edward Dyson, “The Old Whim Horse,” first published in the Bulletin, Sydney, 30 July 1892. Public domain.

It’s the only poem here about an animal whose whole life was a job, and about the particular guilt of an animal who outlives their usefulness to you. If that’s the shape of what you’re carrying, our guide to grieving a horse covers the parts specific to equine loss, including why so few people around you seem to understand it.

When You Need to Not Be Sad for Five Minutes

This one is a joke. That’s why it’s here.

Thomas Gray wrote it in 1747 for his friend Horace Walpole, whose cat, Selima, drowned in a china tub of goldfish. Gray treats a small domestic accident with the full apparatus of classical tragedy: angel forms gliding beneath the water, malignant Fate sitting by and smiling, the cat mewing to every watery god. Then he closes with a mock moral about how not everything that glitters is gold.

Nobody grieves continuously. It arrives in waves with gaps, and the gaps are where you breathe. A poem that lets you laugh at a cat who died of pure greed, without asking you to feel anything about your own animal, gives you one of those gaps on purpose.

Skip this section if it isn’t the right day. It’s here for the day it is.

Thomas Gray, “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat” (1748)

‘Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dy’d
The azure flowers, that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclin’d,
Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declar’d;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws;
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause.

Still had she gaz’d; but ‘midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The Genii of the stream;
Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue,
Thro’ richest purple to the view
Betray’d a golden gleam.

The hapless nymph with wonder saw:
A whisker first, and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretch’d, in vain, to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat’s averse to fish?

Presumptuous maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch’d, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulph between.
(Malignant Fate sat by, and smil’d)
The slipp’ry verge her feet beguil’d,
She tumbled headlong in.

Eight times emerging from the flood
She mew’d to ev’ry wat’ry God,
Some speedy aid to send.
No Dolphin came, no Nereid stirr’d;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard,
A fav’rite has no friend!

From hence, ye beauties, undeceiv’d,
Know, one false step is ne’er retriev’d,
And be with caution bold.
Nor all that tempts your wand’ring eyes,
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all, that glisters, gold.

Thomas Gray, “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes,” first published 1748. Public domain.

Eight times, not nine. Readers have long taken that as Gray counting off her lives and leaving the ninth for the drowning, though he never says so anywhere. It’s the wittiest line in the poem, and almost everyone reads straight past it.

The Rainbow Bridge Poem: Who Actually Wrote It

The Rainbow Bridge was written in 1959 by Edna Clyne-Rekhy, who was nineteen years old and living near Inverness, Scotland, and had just lost her Labrador, Major. Her mother suggested she write down how she felt. She filled both sides of a sheet of paper, typed copies for friends who asked, and left her name off them. She was not publicly identified as the author until February 2023, when she was eighty-two.

For sixty-four years the most widely read piece of animal mourning literature in the English language circulated with no author attached. It reached a mass audience through a “Dear Abby” column on 20 February 1994, printed without attribution. After that, it spread widely, and others began claiming it. Researcher Paul Koudounaris traced the text back to its origin and authenticated Clyne-Rekhy’s original handwritten manuscript, and National Geographic confirmed her authorship in February 2023.

We’re not reprinting it here, and the reason is the same reason we’re telling you her name. A living author wrote it; she has never released it, and the fact that a text has been copied a million times doesn’t make it free. At least three other people have claimed authorship, and the US Copyright Office logged roughly fifteen separate registrations under that title in the five years after the Dear Abby column ran. Not one claim to this text predates it. That timing tells you what those claims are worth, and it also tells you why the only honest thing to put next to this poem is Edna Clyne-Rekhy’s name.

If the poem is what brings you comfort, keep it. Nothing here argues against it. Many people find the reunion imagery does exactly what they need, and many others find it slides off them completely, and both are ordinary. We work through what it offers and what it asks you to believe in our piece on finding comfort in the Rainbow Bridge.

Two Poems We Can’t Reprint, and Where to Read Them

Two of the poems people most often come looking for are still under copyright, so we can point you to them but not include them here. Both are worth the click.

Pablo Neruda, “A Dog Has Died”

Neruda’s elegy for his dog Bobi is the great modern poem on this subject, and it earns that by refusing every consolation on offer. He’s a materialist who doesn’t believe in heaven for people. He announces that he believes in one for dogs anyway, and that he will never get in. He buries the dog by a rusted machine in the garden and says he’ll join him there one day. There is no lesson and no lifting at the end.

It first appeared in Spanish as “Un perro ha muerto” in Jardín de invierno in 1974, one of the volumes published after Neruda died in 1973. The English translation nearly everyone knows ran in Poetry in February 1999 and is generally credited to Alfred Yankauer. Both the original and the translation are protected, and the translation carries its own separate copyright on top of the poem’s. You can read it in full, legitimately, at the Poetry Foundation’s licensed copy of “A Dog Has Died”.

Rudyard Kipling, “Four-Feet”

Twelve lines, and the best short thing in this whole tradition. A man says he has done what most men do and pushed the loss out of his mind, and then admits he can’t forget the sound of four feet trotting along behind him. That’s the entire poem.

It is often listed online as 1919, which is wrong and matters. The Kipling Society records its first publication as 1932, in Limits and Renewals, following the story “The Woman in His Life.” A 1932 work stays protected in the United States for ninety-five years, so it enters the public domain on 1 January 2028. Until then, it can be read but not reproduced, and the copies floating around on memorial sites are there without permission.

Writing a Pet Memorial Poem of Your Own

Write one thing that was true and specific, not a summary of the whole animal. That single instruction fixes most of what goes wrong when people try this. The impulse is to reach for the biggest words available, and the result is a poem that could be about anybody’s pet. What makes Cowper’s hare unforgettable is sliced carrot and a Turkey carpet, not adjectives.

Five Ways to Start a Pet Memorial Poem

You don’t need rhyme, meter, line breaks, or any idea of what you’re doing. Nobody has to read it. Some practical ways in:

• Name one object. The specific bowl, the specific step they couldn’t manage at the end, the towel that’s still in the car. Objects carry more than feelings do, and they’re easier to write about when you can’t think straight.
• Write the sound. Nails on a hardwood floor, the particular sigh they made settling down, the noise at the door at a fixed hour. Sound is what people report missing most, and it’s the hardest thing to photograph.
• Write the argument you’re still having. What you’d say to them, or to the vet, or to the person who told you it was time. Hardy’s cat poem is an argument he loses. That’s allowed.
• Write the thing you can’t say out loud. Relief, if there was relief. Anger. The part you feel guilty about. A page nobody will read is the safest place that exists for it.
• Stop before it resolves. A poem doesn’t have to end with hope or a lesson. Ending on the unresolved thing is usually more honest and almost always better writing.

If a blank page is the obstacle, a prompt beats a poem. Our set of 30 journaling prompts for pet loss grief gives you something to answer rather than something to invent, and plenty of people find that writing a letter to a pet who died is easier than writing a poem and does the same work. If what you’re preparing is something to say in front of other people, the shape is different again, and our guide to writing a pet eulogy covers how to build one that you can actually get through.

What to Do With the Pet Loss Poem You Pick

A poem sitting in a browser tab does very little. The pet loss poems here are all public domain, which means you have permission to move them into the physical world, and moving them is most of where the good comes from.

Read it out loud, even alone in a room, even badly. These were written to be spoken, and they behave differently in the mouth than on a screen. Print it and put it where the food bowls used to sit. Write it inside a card for the person in your life who lost one and doesn’t know that you noticed. Have a line engraved on a marker or a small plate. Put it in the box with the collar. Read it on the anniversary, which arrives whether or not you have made a plan for it.

If you’re doing this for someone else, send the poem and nothing else. No advice, no framing, no how are you holding up. The point of handing somebody a poem is that it says the thing without requiring either of you to perform a conversation about it.

And if the poems aren’t reaching you, that’s information rather than a failure. Some people aren’t helped by language, and grief that has stopped moving at all is worth taking to a person rather than a page. The pet loss grief counselors in our directory work with exactly this.