The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: “Bringing the Shovel Down.” Bringing the Shovel Down, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

Note that all parenthetical citations refer to the line number from which the quotation is taken.

“Bringing the Shovel Down” is composed of 90 free verse lines organized into stanzas of different lengths. Gay has stated in interviews that he wrote the poems in Bringing the Shovel Down in the context of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he became an uncle during this time, he was struck by the notion that his brother’s children would live in a nation at war. In this way, the poems in the collection (including the titular poem) express power dynamics and the relationship between innocence and violence. However, Gay has also stated that he hopes the poems express loving transformation over the course of the collection. This can be seen in the way that Gay repeats “Bringing the Shovel Down” at the end of the collection, except with a crucial difference. In the final poem, (called “Again”), the boy releases the dog instead of killing him.

In “Bringing the Shovel Down,” the speaker intimately addresses a lover and tells a disturbing story that weaves into the present day. In the story, a group of older boys convince a younger boy that an old neighborhood dog named Max is rabid. Haunted, the boy kills Max with a spade in the night, and ultimately finds peace in the dawn. The speaker brings the berries that the boy eats into existence in the poem’s present.