An Elegy On The Death Of A Mad Dog

An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog is a short comic poem by Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), the Anglo-Irish writer who produced major work in poetry, fiction, drama, and the essay across his short career before his death at forty-five. The poem first appeared as part of his novel The Vicar of Wakefield in 1766, where it is sung by one of the characters during a social gathering at the vicarage.

The poem is one of the most enduring of English comic verses. It tells of a good citizen of Islington who is friendly to all creatures including a stray mongrel dog. The dog at first appears to be the citizen’s friend but then turns mad and bites him. The neighbors gather to mourn the man, expecting that he will die from the bite. The poem ends with a final reversal: the man recovered and it was the dog that died.

The joke is in the inversion of expectation across the final lines. The poem builds carefully through the standard elegiac conventions, with each stanza moving the reader further toward the assumed conclusion that the bitten man will die. Goldsmith then pulls the rug at the end with one of the cleanest comic reversals in eighteenth-century English poetry.

The poem became enormously popular in its own century and has remained in standard English poetry anthologies ever since. Various composers including Charles Stanford have set it to music. The final couplet has been quoted in many later contexts and the basic structure has been imitated by various comic poets across the following two and a half centuries.

Goldsmith himself was one of the major figures of mid-eighteenth-century English literature. He was a member of Samuel Johnson’s circle along with Boswell, Reynolds, Burke, and the other figures of the famous Club, and his work covered substantial ground including the novel The Vicar of Wakefield, the long poem The Deserted Village, the play She Stoops to Conquer, and many essays and shorter pieces.

The Elegy is a single short poem of eight quatrains. It pairs with the other poems and prose works of Goldsmith and with the broader eighteenth-century English comic verse tradition that produced Swift’s various comic poems and Pope’s lighter occasional verse.