Most pet memorial poem collections online are padded with verse that is misattributed, in copyright, or written by nobody in particular. Every line here has been checked against a primary text, and one poem was removed in the checking because it turned out not to exist. Everything reproduced in full below is public domain, meaning the author died more than seventy years ago and the words are yours to use. The two poems people most often want are still in copyright, and the last section says so plainly rather than reprinting them anyway. Use what is here for a funeral reading, a eulogy opening, a memorial card, or to read to yourself when the house feels too quiet.
Short verses for a card
These sit on a card with space left for your own handwriting. Four lines or fewer. The brevity does the work.
"To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one, and here he lies."
"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."
Byron's couplet is the shortest and most self-contained: it says everything in two lines. The Kipling stanza above is the opening of the full poem; it's honest about the bargain you make when you love a dog, which is why it still lands more than a hundred years later.
Longer poems for a reading or eulogy
These are the ones to read aloud. They take a minute or two and they hold a room.
Lord Byron: "Epitaph to a Dog" (1808)
Byron wrote this for his Newfoundland, Boatswain, who died of rabies at Newstead Abbey. The memorial stone is still there. The poem is about a dog, but also about what we project onto animals and fail to find in each other.
Near this spot
Are deposited the remains of one
Who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
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 at Newfoundland May 1803
And died at Newstead Nov. 18, 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, unnoticed all his worth,
Denied 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,
Debased 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 smiles hypocrisy, thy words 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 honours none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one, and here he lies.
Rudyard Kipling: "The Power of the Dog" (1909)
This is the one most people are looking for, even if they don't know the title. The last stanza is frequently quoted in isolation, but the full poem earns it. Kipling wrote it as a warning and a testament at the same time.
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?
Rudyard Kipling: "Four-Feet" (1932)
A shorter poem, and a different register. Quieter. The dog is gone, the speaker keeps reaching back for what isn't there. It's about habit as much as grief. Kipling died in 1936; the poem passed into the public domain in 2007 under UK copyright law.
I have done mostly what most men do,
And pushed it out of my mind;
But I can't forget, if I wanted to,
Four-Feet trotting behind.
Day after day, the whole day through:
Wherever my road inclined:
Four-feet said, "I am coming with you!"
And trotted along behind.
Now I must go by some other round:
Which I shall never find:
Somewhere that does not carry the sound
Of Four-Feet trotting behind.
For a cat
Poets who loved cats wrote differently about them: with more wariness, more mutual respect. These two are the ones worth keeping.
Joachim du Bellay: "Épitaphe d'un Chat" (1558)
Du Bellay wrote a formal lament for his cat, Belaud, in the tradition of classical epitaphs, and it is one of the earliest pet elegies in European literature. It appears in his Divers Jeux rustiques of 1558. The French is public domain many times over; the English below is our own working translation of the opening, not a published one, so read it as a gloss rather than as literature.
C'est Belaud mon petit Chat gris :
Belaud, qui fut par avanture
Le plus bel œuvre que Nature
Fit onc en matiere de Chats.
This is Belaud, my little grey cat: Belaud, who was, as it happened, the finest thing Nature ever made in the way of cats.
Thomas Gray: "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes" (1747)
Gray wrote this for Selima, a cat belonging to his friend Horace Walpole, who drowned reaching for goldfish. It is a mock-elegy rather than a lament, and it is funny, which is not always the wrong note. If your cat was a chancer, this is the poem for her.
'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,
Gaz'd on the lake below.
A note on what is not here
An earlier version of this page carried a "Sonnet on a Cat" attributed to Pierre de Ronsard. There is no such poem, which the misattributed quotes page documents in full. It has been removed. We would rather have a shorter page than a poem nobody wrote.
A verse about grief itself
Sometimes you want a poem that doesn't name a specific animal but describes the feeling accurately. Tennyson wrote this about the death of his closest friend; it says something true about any grief.
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
The poems we left out, and why
Two poems dominate pet memorial searches. Neither is here in full, and that's deliberate.
"Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep." Usually credited to Mary Elizabeth Frye, who said she wrote it in 1932 and who died in 2004. That attribution is disputed, and an earlier printing under another name is on record; the misattributed quotes page sets out what we could and could not establish. Either way it is somebody's work and still in copyright in the UK, so it is not reproduced here.
The "Rainbow Bridge" prose poem. This is one of the most searched pet memorial texts online, and its authorship is no longer a mystery. Its author was identified in 2023 and is still living, so the words are hers under UK copyright for her lifetime and seventy years after, and that is why they are not reproduced here. We have written the whole story of it on its own page, including why it circulated as "anonymous" for sixty years and what that did to it.
We also left out several quotes and short verses that circulate under wrong names: including lines attributed to Anatole France and Colette that can't be traced to their supposed sources. If it's not on this page, we couldn't verify it. The quotes page covers that ground in more detail.
When you want the words to be about them
For that, a Small Goodbyes portrait, painted from your own photo, says something these borrowed poems never can. The public-domain poems above sit well alongside a portrait rather than replacing it.
If you're putting something together, our guide to writing a pet sympathy card shows how a short poem and a few words of your own sit together. And if you're still at the point where reading anything feels impossible, the plain-spoken guide to the shapes grief takes might be more useful right now than any verse, and our honest guide to the Rainbow Bridge tells the true story behind the poem so many people reach for.
When you're ready: have their portrait painted.
Written by Craig Fearn, Small Goodbyes. Last updated .
