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Jane Campion’s Gothic Vision of Rural Queerness in “The Power of the Dog”

Jane Campion’s new film “The Power of the Dog,” based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name, is set on a ranch in Montana in the nineteen-twenties. Campion is known for making intensely beautiful images of the natural world, but in the new film (shot in her native New Zealand) her painterly impulses are especially breathtaking. Shots of cattle flowing across the hills and into the Great Plains have the energy of one of Eugène Boudin’s beach scenes. Sequences of men at play and at work, light striking their bare flesh, muscles rippling as they pull ropes and goad their horses, possess the same languid sexual frankness of a Manet or a Degas. The film shares a certain visual vocabulary with “Brokeback Mountain,” Ang Lee’s 2005 adaptation of Annie Proulx’s brilliant short story about two cowboys, Jack and Ennis, who fall in love in nineteen-sixties Wyoming. In “The Power of the Dog,” two lonely men also make a connection of sorts. But amid all of the film’s romantic beauty darkness and violence lurk, including in unexpected places. What looks like it might become a love story turns out to be a tale of revenge.

The story centers on the Burbank brothers, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), who together run a successful ranching outfit. The brothers make a curious pair. Phil has a Yale degree in classics but prefers the honest labor of cattle work, and Cumberbatch lends him the eerie charm of a high-born gone feral among roughnecks. (Note the ease with which he castrates a bull barehanded.) George seems nicer, at first—simple, sweet. Yet he is more bourgeois and image-conscious, riding around in starched suits, and he throws their lives out of balance when he marries a widowed innkeeper, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), and brings her to live in the big, fine house that the brothers share. Feeling alienated and betrayed, Phil begins a campaign of psychological warfare against Rose, driving her to drink and to the edge of madness, sometimes by doing little more than plucking his banjo or whistling a tune. Rose has a teen-age son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and when he joins her on the ranch her nightmare grows more desperate as Phil, initially an antagonist of the boy, seemingly attempts to woo him.

In the course of the film, the Burbanks’ house becomes a gothic interior—as Anthony Lane put it , the film is more chamber drama than Western—but the landscape outside remains an Eden. In this place, the film seems to say, men are allowed to work and play without the intercession of what John Updike once absurdly described as “the chirp and swing and civilizing animation of a female character” and “the ancient, sacralized structures of the family.” Instead, Phil devotes himself to the memory of a late cowboy named Bronco Henry, who once taught the Burbank brothers all they know about ranch life. A saddle that belonged to Bronco Henry is displayed in the barn like a shrine. In one early scene, Phil lies awake in the bedroom that he and his brother shared for most of their lives, listening to the sounds of George and Rose making love next door. In disgust (the ambiguity of its source is a strength of the film), Phil goes out to the barn and removes the saddle from its perch to give it a cleaning. We assume that he’s about to carry this duty out with the same coarseness he’s shown in almost every other scene. Instead, he lovingly, tenderly works oil into the old leather, and Campion plays the moment with a Freudian acuity—the erotic transference is almost too much to bear. Phil, who until this point had seemed a cliché of the macho cowboy, a swaggering example of toxic masculinity, starts to come into fuller view. Perhaps he is a repressed gay man, a onetime lover of Bronco Henry, and his hostility toward Rose and her son has something to do with his own stifled desires.

Dunst plays Rose with a downbeat naturalism that at times hinges on a weird girlishness. I say weird because we learn that Rose’s first husband killed himself, making pariahs out of her and her son, and that she was forced to start running the inn as a means of survival. The things she’s been through ought to shine out of her like light trapped under a frozen sea. In the novel, we better understand why Phil makes Rose his target. After all, she’s an interloper, a threat to the social order, and at moments in the book she does seem like a bit of an operator, less a passive victim than a capricious participant in her own sad state. (At clothing stores, she “was an easy mark for the salesladies, buying hats and gloves and shoes,” Savage writes, adding, “She began to look on clothes as costumes, disguises, masks to hide the useless and frightened self she was becoming.”) There are gleaming moments in Dunst’s performance. When she hears Phil lurking around some dark corner of the house, you feel how she feels the terror of his presence. In one scene, sitting in a fine dress, candlelight flickering as George and his parents wait for her to play the piano, she looks as though she’s facing the gallows. Her portrayal grows stronger the worse off Rose becomes, unspooling until she is frazzled to the point of breaking. But for much of the film the character possesses a naïve skittishness, like a child locked in a cursed dollhouse, whose fatal error was to imagine that she might find happiness again. (Without giving away where Rose’s story goes, I’ll say that the film also softens the edges of some of the novel’s gothic horror.)

Campion, a director known for excavating feminine psychology, here seems most preoccupied with Rose as a catalyst for the shifting relationships among the men around her—and, in particular, for the pas de deux between Peter and Phil. In my mind, the boy and the man represent two contrasting fates of rural queerness. Savage was writing in the nineteen-sixties about the nineteen-twenties, but Peter’s story, in particular, felt familiar to me from my own childhood as a queer Black boy in the nineteen-nineties on a farm in rural Alabama. There are certain harrowing rites of masculinity that may never change. Peter has slim, feminine features. On the ranch, he is awkward and out of place, an easy target. He wants to be a doctor and makes himself seem stranger still by dissecting rabbits in his bedroom. The torment that Phil unleashes upon Peter—mocking his lisp, encouraging the other men to scare him with their horses, spouting homophobic slurs—was familiar to me in the way of old injuries that wake up with bad weather. My chest hurt for the boy, just as it had when I read Savage’s novel almost a decade ago. I was still living in Alabama at the time, in my grandparents’ dark house, and I consumed the story with a desperation that was simultaneously painful and pleasurable.

Watching the film, though, I understood the story a little differently. Where before I mostly recognized myself in Peter’s plight, I now felt a complicated sympathy for Phil, whose tragedy is just as profound, if not more so. In a couple of dreamy scenes, he retreats to a secret spring in the woods, where he slathers his body in mud and then flings himself into the river, or caresses himself with an old handkerchief that once belonged to Bronco Henry. The latter sequence made me think of the end of “Brokeback Mountain,” when Ennis, overwhelmed by the loss of Jack, clutches a nested pair of old shirts, a long-forgotten artifact of their love. The moments of Phil alone, communing with Bronco Henry, are among the film’s strongest, in part because they cast a spell on everything around them, charging even the more prosaic passages with mystery and emotion.

Still, there’s something off about the second half of “The Power of the Dog.” The story goes slack, idling in a place of simmering hostility between Rose and Phil. You wonder, Where is this all going? A pivotal moment comes when Peter discovers Phil’s forest hideaway, including vaguely pornographic material that hints at the true nature of Phil’s devotion to Bronco Henry and the cult of masculinity. Phil, caught bathing in the spring like a figure out of a Greek myth, chases the boy away, screaming obscenities. But afterward something strange happens. Phil softens toward the boy. He promises to teach Peter how to be a real rancher. He says that he’ll make Peter a rope before the boy departs by the end of the summer, and show Peter how to use it, the way Bronco Henry once taught him. It’s a shift that disconcerts Rose, who tries to warn Peter away from him, to no avail.

Suddenly, it seems that Phil and Peter might be kindred spirits—that, despite the strict social codes of their time and their way of life, they will find something meaningful in one another, an unlikely and forbidden bond. I mean, having read the book, I knew that wasn’t where things were headed. But I can understand how a viewer, conditioned on past narratives of connection between lonely strangers, might suspect that something is about to happen between these two. And, to be fair, something does happen, and all of the cold, under-eye gazes with which Peter fixes Phil slowly click into place. A spoiler: Peter isn’t enamored of Phil. Peter hates Phil for the way that Phil has treated Rose. Whether the action he takes feels appropriate or out of proportion will depend, I think, on whether the film has convinced you of the magnitude of Rose’s suffering.

But the bigger question for me is, Why does Phil treat Peter with tenderness after the boy finds him in such an exposed state? I’ve seen how men like that are provoked when their sexuality comes even vanishingly into view. They don’t offer to braid you a rope. They kill you, usually, or try to. In Campion’s film, you don’t really get a sense of the game that Phil is playing. Is he truly taken with the boy, or is he simply out to torture Rose by winning Peter’s attention? A subplot in the novel involves Phil’s habit of hoarding cow hides; he collects them with a growing intensity, and when Rose sells them off for thirty dollars (in the movie she trades them for a pair of gloves) we understand the severity of her transgression. In the film, Phil’s interest in the hides is less developed, resulting in a psychological vagueness that only grows as Rose’s decision to trade the hides ricochets through the final act.

Phil does still braid the promised rope for Peter, using hides that Peter has cut off a dead cow out on the trail. The two men are together in the barn. Phil braids and braids, pulling the hide taut, dipping it, pulling. We hear the train of the rope, and a flashback reminds us of the beautiful paper flowers that Peter once made as table centerpieces for the restaurant at his mother’s inn, and which Phil later torched to light a cigarette. Peter asks Phil about Bronco Henry; the boy walks around the barn, coming into and out of the light, wondering about the man, the myth. We understand the scene to be an inversion of an earlier one in which Phil made Peter sit on Bronco Henry’s saddle in the barn. Now the power has shifted. Phil is the vulnerable one and Peter the one in control. It’s a beautiful, dreamy sequence, but it also feels like a bit of cinematic handwaving, a cheat to sneak some of the missing psychological complexity into the story. Looking back once the film is finished, you might feel as though much of it was a long, luxurious setup. Still, Campion’s dark reveries are potent, and the sound of Cumberbatch’s terrifying whistle followed me into my dreams for days.

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‘The Power of the Dog’: About That Ending

The movie’s subtle conclusion takes a moment to comprehend. But the director, Jane Campion, has a history of working in the realm of suggestion.

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By Nicolas Rapold

This article contains spoilers for the Netflix feature “The Power of the Dog.”

The acclaim for Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” has been loud and clear, from its Venice premiere to its release in theaters and on Netflix . But the ending of Campion’s simmering Western drama has been anything but loud or clear. The movie’s subtle conclusion has a “big reveal” that takes a moment to comprehend — probably not the grand gesture you might expect from the story’s battle of wills.

Adapted from Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, the movie begins with two rancher brothers, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), and follows what happens when George’s new wife, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), and her son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), move in with them. Larger than life and ornery as hell, Phil immediately starts tormenting both mother and son. Rose numbs herself with alcohol, but Peter proves to be a dark horse. He’s awkward but fiercely protective of his mother, and he focuses his watchful intelligence on somehow bringing Phil to justice.

By the end — maybe you know where we’re going with this — Phil is dead. But if you blink you might miss how exactly that happens. We hear that Phil dies from anthrax, but it’s not stated outright that the source was some contaminated rawhide that Peter gives to Phil. Campion offers the barest of clues: an early mention of anthrax, Peter’s discovery of a carcass, Phil’s cutup hands and washing of the rawhide.

Campion’s adaptation departs from Savage’s book, which ends unmistakably with a passage about Peter and anthrax. The beauty of Campion’s directorial decision is that there’s no revenge with a flourish. Instead, we are left to feel the release of tension and anguish that has built up throughout the film. (Truth is stranger than fiction: Savage’s actual step-uncle died of anthrax from a splinter, and was apparently a model for the character of Phil.)

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Benedict Cumberbatch is perhaps not the first actor that springs to mind when thinking of casting a Western, but under the direction of Jane Campion in her stellar drama “The Power of the Dog,” he’s just what the movie needs. Covered head-to-toe in dirt for most of the film, he embodies a character in a masculine crisis. He has a constant need to prove he's the roughest, toughest leader in a wolf pack of cowboys, possibly to hide his adoration and affection for the long-gone man who taught him more than just how to ride a horse. Phil (Cumberbatch) dominates the pecking order of any room he’s in through cruel remarks and an irreverence towards authority. His eyes are cold as mountain air; his face is a stone façade against the world; his tongue is as sharp as a snake fang. Gone are the quirky and endearing characters that Cumberbatch has played in the past. Here, coiled like a predator in wait, Cumberbatch is perhaps more fearsome than as his deep-voiced villains in “The Hobbit” and “ Star Trek Into Darkness .” He moves through the movie like an unsheathed knife, cutting anyone unlucky enough to get close. 

Cumberbatch’s Phil is the rough and tumble Remus to the movie’s kinder Romulus, his brother George ( Jesse Plemons ). Where Phil is calloused and mean, George is gentler and more soft-spoken, often at the mercy of his brother’s teasing. At a stop at a restaurant, Phil harshly taunts Rose ( Kirsten Dunst ), a widow running the joint, and her son Peter ( Kodi Smit-McPhee ), who Phil bullies until Peter walks off the job and leaves his mother in tears. George reaches out to comfort her, and ends up falling for her. This enrages Phil, who takes the loss of his brother to a woman quite badly. He steps up his intimidation of Rose and Peter, like intensifying heat with a magnifying glass. That is, until Peter tries to spend more time with Phil. The unlikely camaraderie unlocks a number of secrets and hidden intentions, changing everyone’s relationship to each other. 

Using New Zealand for 1920s Montana, writer/director Campion sets this quiet-yet-angry Western against a harsh background that’s both beautiful and imposing. For Peter, it presents a hardened masculinity he must learn to overcome. For Phil, this windswept nature is an escape from the life of privilege he wants no part of. It is on the back of a horse that he found himself, and it is on those cow paths, mountain passes, and hidden rivers that he learned to disguise his desires. 

Campion's adaptation of Thomas Savage ’s novel of the same name strips out many details from the book and takes it back to its rawest in-the-moment elements. Backstory is filled in quickly and briefly in dialogue, if it’s ever filled in at all. There are no flashbacks, just a few scenes of characters sharing their past with each other. Campion and her cinematographer Ari Wegner write whole character studies in their close-ups. From this perspective, we get a sense of what the cast may never verbalize. It’s in the pained and panicked look on Rose’s face when she begins drinking after another round of Phil’s harassment. It’s in the steely glares Peter shoots Phil when he’s being picked on. It’s in George’s downward gazes at the floor, knowing he is helpless to stop his brother’s torments. It’s in the rage on Phil’s face as he realizes his tight-knit relationship with his brother is coming to an end with George’s marriage to Rose. It’s an approach Campion has used in her earlier works like “ An Angel at My Table ” and “ The Piano ,” the latter of which follows a main character, Ada ( Holly Hunter ), who cannot speak, but uses her face and sharply gestured sign language to get her point across. There is no doubt when Ada has something to share in “The Piano,” and through Phil’s movement, body language and reactions, Cumberbatch also speaks volumes with every scowl and every defiant smile. 

Many of Campion’s movies also focus on shifting power dynamics between characters: who has power, who loses it, and how they gain it back. Sometimes, this is in the form of women fighting to be heard, like in “ Sweetie ” or “ Bright Star .” But in “The Power of the Dog,” Rose’s entrance into the family is perceived as a threat, a challenge to established order. Phil extends her no kindness, slyly creating a toxic environment that poisons her, in order to retain power over his brother, their business and who is in charge around their stately mansion. She’s like an existential threat to him: she represents the sex he doesn’t desire and someone he doesn’t yet have under control. The truce between Phil and Peter unnerves Rose more, afraid of the influence he may have on her son. She loses herself in the bottle, just as Peter stands up to Phil’s bullying. It's a riveting dance between them all, waiting to see how it all will end once the music stops.

Speaking of the music, “The Power of the Dog” contains some of the best use of music in a movie this year. Jonny Greenwood ’s work underlines and emphasizes many of the actions playing out on-screen. String compositions twist and turn as sharply as the movie’s plot, like a jagged undercurrent pulling our emotions in certain directions. The sounds of sweet violins sour, while softer notes swell into intense waves. The changes are quick, a nod to the tense dynamics between the brothers, the widow, and her son. Many of the songs use plucked strings to create an air of uneasy anticipation, as if cantering into danger. Rows of violins join in to heighten this uneasy feeling, almost awakening our fight or flight response. The music doesn't stray too far from the prototypical Western sound yet adds these extra layers of foreboding throughout.

“The Power of the Dog” revels in this suspenseful place much like Phil prefers working with cattle than dealing with high society. Though the movie starts at a gentle pace, it doesn’t stay there long. There is so much layered desire, hatred, and domination that soon comes rolling out to disturb everyone’s uneasy peace. The game of wits between Phil and everyone else is a chilling one to watch, and it’s exactly the kind of end-of-the-year movie to finish things with a bang.

In theaters today and on Netflix on December 1st.

Monica Castillo

Monica Castillo is a critic, journalist, programmer, and curator based in New York City. She is the Senior Film Programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center and a contributor to  RogerEbert.com .

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The Power of the Dog (2021)

Rated R for brief sexual content/full nudity.

126 minutes

Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil Burbank

Kirsten Dunst as Rose Gordon-Burbank

Jesse Plemons as George Burbank

Kodi Smit-McPhee as Peter Gordon

Frances Conroy as Old Lady

Keith Carradine as Governor Edward

Thomasin McKenzie as Lola

Genevieve Lemon as Mrs. Lewis

Adam Beach as Edward Nappo

• Jane Campion

Writer (based on the novel by)

• Thomas Savage

Cinematographer

• Peter Sciberras
• Jonny Greenwood

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The Biblical Clash at the Core of The Power of the Dog

The film is a face-off between two visions of the American West—one of promise and the other of hostility.

The banjo may seem like an innocent instrument, but in The Power of the Dog , it’s downright menacing. The swaggering rancher Phil Burbank (played by Benedict Cumberbatch ) at the center of Jane Campion’s new film is introduced as a thin-skinned bully who’s quick to insult those around him. But I didn’t realize what a frightening character he was going to be until Phil retired to his bed, pulled out a banjo, and started angrily plucking at it; that humble string instrument hasn’t been played so malevolently on-screen since the notorious “ dueling banjos ” of Deliverance .

Campion’s first feature film in 12 years, based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Savage, is set on a 1925 Montana ranch that’s surrounded by spiky mountains and acres of barren landscape filled with both promise and hostility. There, Phil has proudly carved out a lonely existence for himself as a cattle herder, while his full-hearted brother, George (Jesse Plemons), is dissatisfied with their spartan life and seeking companionship. Into this dynamic wanders local widow Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and her son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). George marries Rose, seeing the newcomers as the beginning of a real family, but Phil derides them as too weak for life on the range.

Read: Escape from quarantine with a Western movie

Westerns almost always wrestle with masculinity in some way, whether through a simple yarn about heroes and villains in the open country, or through a darker reckoning with Americans’ desire to conquer land that is not their own. In The Power of the Dog , Campion embraces the genre’s many possibilities. Each member of her wounded foursome reflects a different aspect of the tainted promise of the West. But Phil, played magnificently by Cumberbatch in a role that’s completely against type, is the furious engine of the film’s heartbreak.

Phil sees himself as the ultimate cowboy. He constantly invokes a now-dead mentor named Bronco Henry who taught him how to survive on the frontier and lashes out at anyone else who dares to try to forge a connection with him. He castrates bulls by hand, binds twine together to make his own ropes, and rarely bathes; whenever he’s inside the drafty mansion his brother has constructed, he feels out of place, like some grimy poltergeist disrupting George’s facade of civility. George may not be spoiling for a fight in the same way that Phil is, but the symbolic fracture between the brothers is undeniable: George desires domesticity, moving grand pianos into the house and hosting dinner parties with politicians, while Phil craves eternal wilderness—the kind of world he can prove his own toughness in. The clash feels almost biblical in nature, a face-off between a harsh, unjust world and a gentle, modern one.

An entire movie about Phil’s cruelty to everyone around him might be unwatchable. But Campion is an empathetic director, and she’s long been drawn to characters whose emotions are buried deep, such as the electively mute Ada of The Piano , the squirrelly older sister Kay of Sweetie , or the introverted academic Frannie of In the Cut . Phil is one of the most layered, enthralling protagonists in her filmography. He has erected impenetrable force fields around his anxieties about manliness, but Peter, whom he initially dismisses as an effeminate mama’s boy, forces him to begin to confront hidden neuroses about his own sexuality. Every twitch on Cumberbatch’s face feels like an earthquake for the viewers, as he draws out the drama in the barest hint of feeling.

Read: Another unpretentious, melancholy farewell from Clint Eastwood

The Power of the Dog is structured in chapters, and each new one veers in a surprising direction. George and Rose’s romance is tender at first, but eventually crumbles under external pressures. Dunst’s performance is achingly nervy, some of the best work she’s done in years; Plemons registers his adoration and his apprehensions quietly, keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of Phil’s abuse and Rose’s inner demons. Smit-McPhee initially plays Peter as a sensitive teen making paper-flower arrangements to keep his mother happy, but he gradually reveals the character’s brutal side. Campion builds his antagonistic yet fraternal dynamic with Phil into a fascinating puzzle for audiences to try to solve.

But the film offers no definitive judgments on its anguished ensemble. The cinematographer Ari Wegner’s camera will occasionally zoom out for massive aerial shots that underline the insignificance of the people milling among the mountains, trying to make something of themselves. Campion never takes a side in the ongoing conflict between George and Phil, instead brilliantly capturing the purpose, and the futility, in each brother’s approach, making The Power of the Dog an inimitable viewing experience.

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The Power of the Dog

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 to 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 to a 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?

Summary of The Power of the Dog

Analysis of literary devices used in the power of the dog, analysis of poetic devices used in the power of the dog, quotes to be used.

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?

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A Short Analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Power of the Dog’

Kipling’s fine poem about our canine friends

‘The Power of the Dog’ by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), prolific poet, novelist, and writer of short fiction for both adults and children, extols the dog’s most famous virtue – its undying loyalty and devotion to its owner – but also warns against giving your heart to a dog for it ‘to tear’. Dogs, for Kipling, are not just man’s best friend: they are heartbreakers.

The Power of the Dog

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 to 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 to a 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?

So it should come as little surprise that Kipling wrote a poem in praise of the bond between men and dogs. ‘The Power of the Dog’ suggests that dogs have such a hold over men that they can, indeed, break a man’s heart as a woman can: ‘ So why in – Heaven (before we are there) / Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear? ’

Dogs are so heart-breaking because their lifespans are significantly shorter than our own, so we have to suffer the heartbreak of burying several loyal companions in one lifetime (as Kipling himself did). Whilst the tone and rhythm of ‘The Power of the Dog’ come across as song-like (especially with its refrain closing each stanza) and almost playful and light, there’s no doubt that Kipling was being serious about the close bond humans can have with their canine companions.

Discover more classic dog poems with Thomas Hardy’s poem about his dog Wessex and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem to her dog, Flush .

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2 thoughts on “A Short Analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Power of the Dog’”

• Pingback: 10 of the Best Poems about Dogs | Interesting Literature

This one always makes me cry. So does ‘His Apologies’ spoken by a dog passing through puppyhood to final dreadful moment when he begs for ‘a quick release.’ And of course the end of ‘Thy Servant a Dog’ narrated by a small Aberdeen terrier, is heart-breaking: “Please, I am very little small mis’able dog!…I do not understand!…I do not understand!” Kipling was wrote less sympathetically about Cats. Perhaps he felt they were not really good chaps at heart.

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The Power of the Dog

By Rudyard Kipling

‘The Power of the Dog’ by Rudyard Kipling is a touching poem about the important relationships that humans develop with their dog companions. 

Rudyard Kipling

His writing is read around the world and studied in classrooms in multiple languages.

Poem Analyzed by Emma Baldwin

B.A. English (Minor: Creative Writing), B.F.A. Fine Art, B.A. Art Histories

In ‘The Power of the Dog’ Kipling discusses themes of joy and sorrow, as well as human/animal relationships. These relationships, specifically those between dogs and humans are the main subject of the poem . His speaker is emotionally compromised by his experience with these animals and is trying to express the sorrow he has felt by suggesting that humans stop keeping dogs entirely. This is not an honest argument, rather one made in order to emphasize the importance of these creatures in our lives.  

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• 4 Analysis of The Power of the Dog

Summary of The Power of the Dog  

The poem addresses the sad facts of a dog’s short life and how that life brings one so much joy and then so much sorrow. The death of a dog, the speaker says, brings too much sadness into one’s life. We should not, as humans who already suffer enough, seek out more sadness for ourselves. The stanzas take the reader through the parts of a dog’s life, concluding with a dog’s illness and death.  

Structure of The Power of the Dog  

‘ The Power of the Dog’ by Rudyard Kipling is a five-stanza poem that is separated into four sets of six lines and one final set of eleven lines. These lines all follow a simple rhyme scheme of AABBCCDD, and so on, changing end sounds from line to line and stanza to stanza. They are all also similar in length, ranging from nine syllables up to eleven.

Poetic Techniques in The Power of the Dog

Kipling makes use of several poetic techniques in ‘The Power of the Dog’. These include but are not limited to alliteration , enjambment , repetition , and caesura . The first of these, alliteration, occurs when words are used in succession, or at least appear close together, and begin with the same sound. For example, “Perfect passion” in line three of the second stanza and “With,” “whimper,” and “welcome” in line two of the fourth stanza.  

Caesura occurs when a line is split in half, sometimes with punctuation, sometimes not. The use of punctuation in these moments creates a very intentional pause in the text. A reader should consider how the pause influences the rhythm of one’s reading and how it might come before an important turn or transition in the text. For example, the fifth line of the third stanza reads: “Then you will find—it’s your own affair”.  

Another important technique commonly used in poetry is enjambment. It occurs when a line is cut off before its natural stopping point. Enjambment forces a reader down to the next line, and the next, quickly. One has to move forward in order to comfortably resolve a phrase or sentence. For instance, the transition between the first line and the second of the first stanza and that between lines there and four of the third stanza.

The last line of each stanza provides the reader with a good example of repetition. In it, Kipling reuses the phrase “for a dog to tear”. This is an example of a refrain and of epistrophe , in which the last word or words of a line are repeated .  

Analysis of The Power of the Dog

Stanza one  .

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.

In the first stanza of ‘The Power of the Dog,’ the speaker begins by outlining the sorrowful nature of our world. There is so much of it to go around, why, he wonders, “do we always arrange for more?” In this case, the more is coming in the form of a dog. When one allows a dog into their life they are willingly giving the dog their “heart…to tear”. The poet is not saying this because he hates dogs but because he loves them. He knows the joy they can bring their human companions as well as the sorrow when they’re gone.

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.

The second stanza outlines more clearly why it is he thinks that dogs bring so much sorrow into human lives. He speaks about the process of buying a “pup” and what it will bring into one’s life. At first, there will be “perfect passion” and “worship” that cannot be dissuaded by kicks. It is fed equally by all attention one pays a dog. Their loyalty is unwavering.  

But, the last two lines add this is no reason to risk one’s heart for a dog.  

Stanza Three

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 to a dog to tear.

The third stanza of ‘The Power of a Dog’ brings the reader to the passing of a beloved pet. When they are around “fourteen years old” they pass on. That is all that nature will permit. This is an example of personification . He capitalizes “Nature” to make it seem as though it has more agency than it does. It chooses, as if sentient, the period in which a dog can live.  

It could be from anything, peaceful or less so. Often, the prescription for one’s ill dog is death. The vet usually leads there and then it is up to you to decide what to do about your animal’s life. In the last line, he repeats the refrain again.

Stanza Four

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 to a dog to tear.

In the last six-line stanza of ‘The Power of the Dog,’ the speaker takes the reader to directly after one’s dog’s death. It is the time when the body is still and the “whimper of welcome,” a great example of alteration, is “stilled”. A reader should take note of the phrase “how still!” In the second line. It is added in as an example of an aside . The speaker is talking to himself, and to the reader, emphasizing the pain of this part of a dog’s existence.  

The fourth line also provides the reader with a good example of alliteration with the repetition of the words “gone,” “goes,” and “good”. The rhythm of this pattern emphasizes the phases of a dog’s life. It is there, then it is gone.  

Stanza Five  

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?

The final stanza of ‘The Power of the Dog’ is longer than the previous four. In it, the speaker reiterates his belief that “We,” the human race, have enough sorrow “in the natural way” without dogs. In the next lines, he uses an extended metaphor comparing love to money and loans that are “lent” for a period of time. He relates this to interest and how over time more money, and therefore more love, should accumulate.  

But, the next lines add, this is not always the case. The longer the love exists does not make it stronger. Dogs only live for around 14 years but the love we bear them is much greater.  

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Baldwin, Emma. "The Power of the Dog by Rudyard Kipling". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/rudyard-kipling/the-power-of-the-dog/ . Accessed 14 August 2024.

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Jane Campion

The Power of the Dog

Jane Campion returns to the kind of mythic frontier landscape—pulsating with both freedom and menace—that she previously traversed in The Piano in order to plumb the masculine psyche in The Power of the Dog, set against the desolate plains of 1920s Montana and adapted by the filmmaker from Thomas Savage’s novel. After a sensitive widow (Kirsten Dunst) and her enigmatic, fiercely loving son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) move in with her gentle new husband (Jesse Plemons), a tense battle of wills plays out between them and his brutish brother (Benedict Cumberbatch), whose frightening volatility conceals a secret torment, and whose capacity for tenderness, once reawakened, may offer him redemption or spell his destruction. Campion, who won an Academy Award for her direction here, charts the repressed desire and psychic violence coursing among these characters with the mesmerizing control of a master at the height of her powers.

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• United States, New Zealand
• 128 minutes
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• PLUS: An essay by film critic Amy Taubin New cover by Greg Ruth

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The Power of the Dog: What Kind of Man?

In her first film that places a male character front and center, Jane Campion trains her unsparing gaze on the brutality of patriarchal power and the pain of repressed homoerotic desire.

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The Power of the Dog

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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 to 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 to a 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?

This poem is in the public domain.

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If you can keep your head when all about you    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,    But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,    Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,

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The Power of the Dog

Charismatic rancher Phil Burbank inspires fear and awe in those around him. When his brother brings home a new wife and her son, Phil torments them until he finds himself exposed to the poss... Read all Charismatic rancher Phil Burbank inspires fear and awe in those around him. When his brother brings home a new wife and her son, Phil torments them until he finds himself exposed to the possibility of love. Charismatic rancher Phil Burbank inspires fear and awe in those around him. When his brother brings home a new wife and her son, Phil torments them until he finds himself exposed to the possibility of love.

• Jane Campion
• Thomas Savage
• Benedict Cumberbatch
• Kirsten Dunst
• Jesse Plemons
• 1.6K User reviews
• 341 Critic reviews
• 89 Metascore
• 282 wins & 317 nominations total

Top cast 42

• Phil Burbank

• Rose Gordon

• George Burbank

• Peter Gordon
• (as Genevieve Lemon)
• (as Ken Radley)

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• Trivia Kirsten Dunst worked very hard to learn the piano piece she plays on-screen. She had originally mastered two musical pieces, but one was cut from the final release, much to her chagrin.
• Goofs Peter uses a hula hoop to burn off some of his anger. The modern hula hoop, however, was introduced in 1958. While Native Americans use hoops in traditional dances these are used in very different ways to the modern hula hoop.

[first lines]

Peter Gordon : When my father passed, I wanted nothing more than my mother's happiness. For what kind of man would I be if I did not help my mother? If I did not save her?

• Connections Edited into Amanda the Jedi Show: Faster than your First Time Reviews 2 - Best and Worst of TIFF 2021 (2021)
• Soundtracks Katy Did Traditional Arranged and Performed by David Ward Published by Bad Girl Creek Productions Ltd

User reviews 1.6K

• Dec 27, 2021
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• December 1, 2021 (United States)
• New Zealand
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Official Netflix
• El poder del perro
• Dunedin, New Zealand
• New Zealand Film Commission
• Cross City Films
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $35,000,000 (estimated)

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• Runtime 2 hours 6 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
• Dolby Digital

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The Power of the Dog: The Rope as a Metaphor for Freedom

The Power of the Dog by Jane Campion is not what you would expect from a traditional western narrative. Based on the novel by the same name, the film changes its setting but does not let it affect the way it tells the story.

The most interesting thing about The Power of the Dog is its subtlety. The film questions the traditional norms regarding what being a man really means ingeniously. The three primary male figures in the movie, Phil, George and Peter, played by Benedict Cumberbatch , Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee respectively, bring forth distinctly different kinds of masculinity and their own understanding of being a man. Phil's character appears as a representation of the textbook masculine man who has no time for emotions and lives by his work, who likes to drink and unnecessarily make fun of boys who seem 'effeminate' — in this case, Peter. George on the other hand allows himself more leeway; he is someone who would like to have a family and settle down in the embrace of gentle comfort. Peter seems to be innocent and weak but there is something about his character that tells us, from the very beginning, that he is not exactly who he appears to be.

The film uses various inanimate objects to deliver important details about the story to its viewers. The obvious ones were, of course, the handkerchief of Bronco Henry that Phil cannot let go of and the nude male pictures in Phil's box that give away his homosexuality. Amid these, the usage of the rope was particularly interesting. The film, being the subversive piece of art that it is, uses the rope, something that is generally associated with bondage, as a symbol of freedom. Peter mentions to Phil that his father had hanged himself. His father, an alcoholic, died by suicide by hanging himself and it was Peter who had cut him down. The rope that had killed his father freed his mother from a marriage to an alcoholic and she eventually ended up with George, a good man who intended to take good care of her. However, Phil's presence in the house drives Rose to alcohol, something she had never touched before. This concerns Peter and he promises his mother that he will make sure she does not have to be the way she is now.

It is quite symbolic how Peter does that. He starts bonding with Phil as they gradually begin to understand each other, only to kill him with anthrax through a rope that Phil was crafting for him. In both the cases with his father and Phil, it is the involvement of the ropes that kills them and makes life easier for Rose. And in both cases, Peter takes a part in that; in the former case as someone who arrives after everything has been done and in the second one, as the one who orchestrates everything. The rope remains a constant in both situations; ensuring the death of the men who stood in the way of Rose's happiness.

Also Read: Like A Child Having A Tantrum: Benedict Cumberbatch On His The Power Of The Dog Character

The rope here brings freedom into the lives of the characters instead of causing them suffocating bondage. After Phil's death, everyone in the family, including his own parents heave a sigh of relief, as they finally start bonding with Rose and things seem to fall into their place. The rope here neatly ties the relationships up and makes way for a life of freedom.

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The Power of the Dog

37 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Before You Read

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-14

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 4-6 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 summary.

Phil is described at the beginning of this chapter as having an ability to see the true nature of animals and people alike. He has a gift for seeing in the eyes of a person what kind of temperament that person has, and can sense any lack of confidence. Because of George’s out-of-the-ordinary behavior of late, Phil knows that something is up.

While working in his blacksmith shop, Phil recalls memories of his youth and the way George and he were raised. Modesty, particularly as it relates to the body, was one of the more esteemed values in the Burbank household. This modesty of the body and of being naked carried into George and Phil’s adulthood. Phil then reflects on alcohol consumption and how the ranch-hands would typically abuse it and get very drunk. His memories then shift to an incident in which a ranch-hand put small sticks of dynamite into the rear of magpies only to watch them fly away and explode. Phil was ambivalent about this act of cruelty; although he believed the killing of the parasitic magpie to be necessary, he was conflicted about how the killing was performed.

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