Les Murray

Dog Fox Field

Dog Fox Field - meaning Summary

Vulnerable Figures, Communal Horror

The poem paints a stark, communal scene in a place called Dog Fox Field where named young figures—Anna, Paul, Irma, Hans—move into darkness and are hunted, wounded and transported in vans. It contrasts small individual details with repeated, impersonal violence, framing the victims as ongoing sentries whose suffering exposes a persistent, collective horror. The tone is bleak and elegiac, registering both specific human presence and systemic cruelty.

Read Complete Analyses

These were no leaders, but they were first into the dark on Dog Fox Field: Anna who rocked her head, and Paul who grew big and yet giggled small, Irma who looked Chinese, and Hans who knew his world as a fox knows a field. Hunted with needles, exposed, unfed, this time in their thousands they bore sad cuts for having gazed, and shuffled, and failed to field the lore of prey and hound they then had to thump and cry in the vans that ran while stopped in Dog Fox Field. Our sentries, whose holocaust does not end, they show us when we cross into Dog Fox Field.

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