Gertrude Stein’s “A Dog” From Tender Buttons

Like most of her other poems such as “If I Told Him, A Complete Portrait of Picasso”, “Yet

Dish” and so on, Stein seems like she is attempting to articulate her first impression or

perspective on the subject, let it be anything. The poet is describing her object of interest,

in this case a dog as the sub-title suggests, with respect to its physical appearance but the

ambiguity in her thoughts is conspicuous when she juggles herself between her

fragmented yet solid thoughts. This may be due to her automatic poetry writing style which

makes use of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique which was visibly prevalent in the

modernist work of literature by authors like James Joyce, Virginia Woolfe etc.

As I progressed through Stein’s poetry, her imagist descriptions reminded me of the post-

structuralist notion, where a sign exists only in correlation with other signs and it is the

differences and similarities between them which make something or someone what they

are. When Stein tried to justify her first perception of a dog through her words, it looks like

she is describing the dog in contrary to the monkey and donkey. But at some point, I felt

like the poet’s approach was rather judgmental or conclusive since she tends to ignore or

fail to acknowledge the presence of the reader’s conception and knowledge about the dog.

As Stein seems to share more mutuality with the deconstruction rather than the

structuralism, her language style and unique skills speak for themselves due to its novel

questioning stance towards the conventional ways.

But then, it feels like we are all trying to interpret Stein’s words in our own subjective ways,

when she herself has hidden the meanings within the lines brilliantly. The lack of clarity in

her poetry on the first reading may tempt the readers to dismiss her but to me, it feels like,

the poet is talking for herself through her own encrypted language which is the very

English language in itself that lacks jargon but does not seem classic. At times, I get the

feeling that Stein is trying to play a sardonic joke on her readers when the text itself is

incomprehensible and it makes us doubt ourselves in our ability to enjoy poetry by

decoding its meaning, weaved through tactful and contextual usage of words. But her

poetry got me interested in her idea of perception, the relation between singularities and

pluralities in her approaches, the existence of multiple realities, attempt to correlate

literature to other arts and subjects using unique set of language devices like enjambment,

imagery, cubism and so on. The excerpt “A Dog” from Tender Buttons goes like this:

“A little monkey goes like a donkey

that means to say that means to say

that more sighs last goes. Leave with

it. A little monkey goes like a donkey.”

Rather than trying to dig up sense for every word, I guess what Stein intends through her

word play involving deconstruction of syntax, is the overall meaning which may or may not

lie in its essence. Maybe she is trying to re-instate the fact that unpredictability is an

automatic way of life that is rather inevitable.