What does Gertrude Stein's poem "A Dog" mean? I know there is a deeper layer of meaning, I just can't find it!?

Question

The poem goes like this:

A Dog
by Gertrude Stein

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.

Additional Details

This isn't for a class. It's just an interesting piece of literature that I'm trying to untangle.

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Voters

A little monkey goes,
like a donkey that means to say (means to say that more).
Sighs last.
Goes.
Leave with it.
A little monkey goes like a donkey.

Like LK, I have not seen this before. It's a hoot. LK's information given about Stein is correct, succinct and interested me.
So much of Stein's work is pure imagery, purely written for the sound and rhythm and enjoyment...it's possible she means nothing more than..."What does this make you feel?" "Do you like the sound?"
As you can see above, I tried to break this poem down (a number of different ways, this is the best I could do) to see if I could get something more out of it, but I am still at a loss as to what she intends, beyond making me think harder than I have all week and making me smile...could be the point, but I'm with you...I think there might be more...
I know Stein's watching from wherever she is and smiling as we try to figure this out...

If this is for a class, please let us know what the teacher thinks...I'm going to "leave with it" and just enjoy it for now...thanks for bringing this to us all...

Answer 2

What?

Answer 3

Stein is known for obscurity - and absurdity as well.
She lived her then extremely 'different' life writing such items as this one and more.

I haven't seen this poem before and read it a couple of times.

It says to me that the 'on purpose stutter' = "...that means to say that means to say that..." - [a common thing found in all Stein wrote] - in the poem shows the worth of sighing about what a person (or a dog, or a monkey, or a donkey) has.

Sighs weren't worth much at all for Gertrude Stein, a woman of strong beliefs and a stronger, nearly bullying, lifestyle.

She didn't write much that saw the light of praise from ordinary readers of her day, though many think she did.
Modern artists (put Picasso in there, etc.) and others were often guests of hers.

Perhaps people now think she was popular then because her book "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" - her companion and typist for many years - WAS popular, at least for a while.

P.S. 'enotes.com' also mentioned, in several essays on Stein, that she was so unconventional she often simply left nouns out, or repeated them, or wrote around what she really meant. She was well-educated but dropped out of two universities without ever getting a degree. Like that like that like that.

Source(s):

http://www.enotes.com This site helped sort things out more clearly.
I'm not sure what you can read there. I have membership & read all possibles for you.

Answer 4

I don't think anyone really knows what Stein was on about. Personally, I've never been able to work out if she was a genius or just having a dadaist joke at our expense. I read 'Tender Buttons' once. It made my brain hurt.

The way that I would begin to approach Stein is to look at her work in the context of what was happening in the visual arts at the time. Stein was a champion of the modern art movement (she was a major collector of post-expressionist, fauvist and cubist paintings) and one can see parallels in what artists were doing in the early 20th century and her writing.

The aforementioned dada movement sought to subvert the art world by exhibiting pieces that went against existing preconceptions of what art was. In this way, Stein's seemingly intelligible prose/poetry can be seen as a deliberate attempt to present something that challenges the reader to think outside of what they have been conditioned to believe a piece of writing should be.

Or if you look at Stein in a cubist context, she was deconstructing language and re-assembling it in an way that initially seems fractured beyond recognition, but somehow presents a picture from its fractured parts that forms a recognizable whole.

So what does the poem mean? I've no idea. But it kind of works doesn't it? Good luck with Stein, she's about as hard as it gets.