An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog

Fiction | Poem | Middle Grade | Published in 1766

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

Goldsmith’s trademark as a writer was his sense of humor. He was both an ironist, as demonstrated by The Vicar of Wakefield and its associated poetry, and a satirist, as demonstrated by The Citizen of the World, a series of letters supposedly written by a Chinese tourist critiquing England. Goldsmith’s friend and fellow writer Samuel Johnson deemed Goldsmith’s The Traveller the best poem since the death of famed satirist Alexander Pope (1688-1744), and although The Traveller in particular is not satiric, the comparison between Pope and Goldsmith is an apt one. Perhaps Pope’s most famous poem was The Rape of the Lock (1712), a mock-heroic poem about a man who cut a lock of a woman’s hair without her permission. Pope parodies the language and tone of mythological epics and applies them to a comparably trivial social misdemeanor, humorously satirizing what he saw as an overreaction to social taboos. While Goldsmith’s “An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog” does not directly reference or criticize any real event or idea, the poem does similarly parody another genre for the sake of humor.

Another writer who preceded Goldsmith in the genre of satire was the Anglo-Irish poet and pamphleteer Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Like Goldsmith, Swift composed a satire or parody of an elegy in the form of his “A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General” (1722) (see “Further Reading & Resources” section). In his poem, Swift elegizes the general by ironically reciting his deeds of cruelty, like his making widows and orphans weep (Line 24). Swift’s satirical elegy may be more socially critical than Goldsmith’s, but both writers adopted the form of the elegy to facilitate the comedic elements of their poems, a tactic Goldsmith repeated from his earlier poem “An Elegy on the Glory of Her Sex, Mrs. Mary Blaize” (1759). In his previous mock elegy, Goldsmith similarly uses irony to emphasize the vices of a falsely Christian woman, like he would do again in “An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog.”

Religious Context

Much of the humor and thematic concepts in “An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog” is based on its audience having a certain level of Christian understanding. In the description of the dog-bitten man, the speaker alludes to several passages from the Bible. The speaker remarks on his “godly race” (Line 7), an allusion to the metaphor of life as a race used in various books of the Bible. In Hebrews 12:1, the writer urges, “Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” (KJV), and in 2 Timothy 4:7, the apostle Paul states that he has “finished” his “course” or race and has “kept the faith” (KJV). In Scripture, faithfully following the Christian religion throughout one’s life is frequently compared to running and completing a race. Goldsmith adopts that language and metaphor, although he ironically literalizes the man’s “godly race” as an actual race to arrive at church for prayer.

Similarly, the speaker makes the statement that the man clothes the naked whenever he clothes himself (Lines 11-12). Scripture emphasizes the necessity of charity towards the poor; the prophets preached the virtue of covering or clothing the naked (Isaiah 58:7, Ezekiel 18:7), and even Christ himself spoke on the subject. He preached that damnation awaited those that saw the naked and “clothed [them] not” (Matthew 25:43 KJV). Each of these verses and precepts would be very familiar to Goldsmith’s largely Christian audience, who would understand the irony at play with these descriptions of the man.

Another important aspect of the religious context for the poem is the Bible’s view on dogs. In many passages, dogs are used as byword for evil and morally corrupt individuals. For example, the apostle Paul warns the church to “beware of dogs” and “evil workers” (Philippians 3:2 KJV) in the same breath, equating the two groups, and the psalmist David laments, “For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me” (Psalm 22:16 KJV). In each case, dogs are considered interchangeable with the unclean and wicked. Goldsmith deliberately toys with this idea in his poem, demonstrating how even a stray and supposedly rabid dog cannot match the corruption of cruelty of a human being. The man survives the dog’s bite, but the dog cannot survive the man’s poisonous nature.