The Speaker

The speaker confesses a burning need to tell a particular story to the beloved, thus presenting the poem's embedded narrative. This narrative concerns a group of neighborhood kids who convince a younger boy that an old dog named Max is rabid and likely to attack. Subsequently, the boy kills Max. It is not clear why the speaker must tell this story, but details from the story transcend space and time to arrive in the poem's present.

It is possible that the speaker is unreliable because he or she compares "the yarn" that the kids "spin" to telling the story in the first place. The phrase "spin a yarn" means to tell a long, imaginative, and untrue story. However, it ultimately does not matter whether the story is true because it succeeds in communicating the speaker's point: we can all be implicated in violent acts even if we...