As the reader learns from the title of the poem, it’s a good thing the speaker fails to have a gun in their house, or they would not learn the important lesson of managing annoyance. If the speaker had had a gun, there is a possibility they would have shot the neighbor’s barking dog, thereby terminating their opportunity for growth. By meditating on the “muffled” (Line 8) bark, the speaker transforms it into something both miraculous and humorous. The dog “[sits] there in the oboe section barking” (Line 14). If the speaker had ended the dog’s life, they might never realize that even the most annoying situations have life lessons to offer. The speaker would never have seen the bark as artistic or had the image of the dog as a musician.

According to renowned meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, this poem “addresses the attempt to incorporate a nuisance sound” (Stark, Gail Andersen. Creating a Life of Integrity, 2020) and is a good example of how allowing an annoying sound to exist enables the listener to accept it rather than fight against it. Goldstein acknowledges his own frustration with a noisy leaf blower disrupting his meditation and compares it to the barking dog in Collins’s poem.