Oliver Goldsmith was an Anglo-Irish novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright born on 10th November 1728 and died on 4th April 1774. He is most known for his popular novel The Vicar of the Wakefield, published in 1766, and his comedy-drama She Stoops to Conquer 1771. In addition, he is also known for his philosophical poem ‘The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society’ published in 1764, his pastoral poem The Deserted Village published in 1770, and The Hermit, a 160-line romantic ballad published in 1765.
An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog is a satirical ironic poem written by Oliver Goldsmith that was a part of his popular novel The Vicar of the Wakefield. The poem is about a rabid dog that bites a man, and the effect that this act of violence has on the people of London.
An elegy is a generally serious poem written to honor an individual who has died. Even though it is titled as an ‘elegy’, the obvious tone of the poet is that of derision and mockery. He gets the readers to contemplate over superficial attributes of an individual and questions the generally acknowledged version of what defines ‘good’.
The poem describes the death of a mad dog who once bit a very good man who was admired by everyone. The man and the dog lived in a town called Islington, which was full of all different kinds of dogs, and the man at first befriended this dog when they encountered one another. However, for some unknown reason, the dog bit the man, and everyone was shocked that the dog would bite so good a man, they decided that the dog must be mad and believed that the man would die of his injury. However, it was the tragic death of the dog at the end that imparts the complete impact of what the poet has been advocating all this while!
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