( Poem #286) An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog Good people all, of every sort,
Give ear unto my song;
And if you find it wondrous short,
It cannot hold you long.
In Islington there was a man,
Of whom the world might say
That still a godly race he ran,
Whene'er he went to pray.
A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad,
When he put on his clothes.
And in that town a dog was found,
As many dogs there be,
Both mongrel, puppy, whelp and hound,
And curs of low degree.
This dog and man at first were friends;
But when a pique began,
The dog, to gain some private ends,
Went mad and bit the man.
Around from all the neighbouring streets
The wondering neighbours ran,
And swore the dog had lost his wits,
To bite so good a man.
The wound it seemed both sore and sad
To every Christian eye;
And while they swore the dog was mad,
They swore the man would die.
But soon a wonder came to light,
That showed the rogues they lied:
The man recovered of the bite,
The dog it was that died.
-- Oliver Goldsmith |
Another wonderfully cutting poem, the irony being all the better for being
understated. The verse, likewise, has a deliberately simple rhythm to it, an
appeal to 'popularity' established by the first stanza, where the narrator
is cast into the mould of storyteller rather than 'high' poet.
Of course, the poem itself is clear enough, and its central character
practically a stereotype, but there's apparently more to it than that -
according to the Dictionary of Sensibility,
The dog, as we know, is Friedrich Nietzsche; [...] a figure of
sensibility, the mad philosopher/prophet/poet who either heals or infects
the community.
Well, I didn't know, but I'll take their word for it. It goes on to explain
the bite as an act that 'exposes the community's belief in the harmlessness
of corruption'. Read the whole theory at
[broken link] http://www.engl.virginia.edu/~enec981/dictionary/24goldsmithD2.html
m.
Biography and Assessment:
Goldsmith, Oliver
b. Nov. 10, 1730, Kilkenny West, County Westmeath, Ire.
d. April 4, 1774, London
The son of an Irish clergyman, he was graduated from Trinity College,
Dublin, in 1749. He studied medicine at Edinburgh and Leiden, but his
career as a physician was quite unsuccessful. In 1756 he settled in
London, where he achieved some success as a miscellaneous contributor to
periodicals and as the author of Enquiry into the Present State of Polite
Learning in Europe (1759). But it was not until The Citizen of the World
(1762), a series of whimsical and satirical essays, that he was recognized
as an able man of letters. His fame grew with The Traveler (1764), a
philosophic poem, and the nostalgic pastoral The Deserted Village (1770).
However, his literary reputation rests on his two comedies, The
Good-natur'd Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1773), and his only
novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). His comedies injected a much-needed
sense of realism into the dull, sentimental plays of the period. They are
lively, witty, and imbued with an endearing humanity. The Vicar of
Wakefield is the warm, humorous, if somewhat melodramatic, story of a
country parson and his family. Although he earned a great deal of money in
his lifetime, Goldsmith's improvidence kept him poor. Boswell depicted him
as a ridiculous, blundering, but tenderhearted and generous creature. He
had the friendship of many of the literary and artistic great of his day,
the most notable being that of Samuel Johnson.
-- Columbia Encyclopedia
Goldsmith's rise from total obscurity was a matter of only a few years. He
worked as an apothecary's assistant, school usher, physician, and as a hack
writer--reviewing, translating, and compiling. It remains amazing that this
young Irish vagabond, unknown, uncouth, unlearned, and unreliable, was yet
able within a few years to climb from obscurity to mix with aristocrats and
the intellectual elite of London. Such a rise was possible because
Goldsmith had one quality, soon noticed by booksellers and the public, that
his fellow literary hacks did not possess--the gift of a graceful, lively,
and readable style.
[...]
When Oliver Goldsmith died he had achieved eminence among the writers of
his time as an essayist, a poet, and a dramatist. He was one "who left
scarcely any kind of writing untouched and who touched nothing that he did
not adorn"--such was the judgment expressed by his friend Dr. Johnson. His
contemporaries were as one in their high regard for Goldsmith the writer,
but they were of different minds concerning the man himself. He was, they
all agreed, one of the oddest personalities of his time.
[...]
Goldsmith's success as a writer lay partly in the charm of personality
emanated by his style--his affection for his characters, his mischievous
irony, and his spontaneous interchange of gaiety and sadness. He was, as a
writer, "natural, simple, affecting." It is by their human personalities
that his novel and his plays succeed, not by any brilliance of plot, ideas,
or language. In the poems again it is the characters that are remembered
rather than the landscapes--the village parson, the village schoolmaster,
the sharp, yet not unkindly portraits of Garrick and Burke. Goldsmith's
poetry lives by its own special softening and mellowing of the traditional
heroic couplet into simple melodies that are quite different in character
from the solemn and sweeping lines of 18th-century blank verse. In his
novel and plays Goldsmith helped to humanize his era's literary
imagination, without growing sickly or mawkish. Goldsmith saw people, human
situations, and indeed the human predicament from the comic point of view;
he was a realist, something of a satirist, but in his final judgments
unfailingly charitable.
-- EB
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