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.
Commentary
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
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/~enec981/dictionary/24goldsmithD2.html
— Martin
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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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Martin DeMello · 9 December 1999
Also spracht Martin Julian DeMello…
And as several people have pointed out, Nietzsche lived after Goldsmith did, so shame on me for not being more awake. I still liked the central theory of the man as society and the dog as the ‘mad’ poet-philosopher, though.
m.
Charlave · 11 May 2005
what is this poem about its very good
SwanWhiteco1 · 19 August 2005
I came to this site because I have just finished W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil. In it, the cuckholded husband dies of cholera and his last word’s are “The dog it was that died.”
Very apropos,
Claudia, Wilmette, Illinois
Goksu OZCAN · 17 September 2006
I have written this poem only two line on The Painted Veil(S.Maugham’s book) and I have interested it…I found it and I liked
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Stephen W Smoliar · 2 October 2006
I am surprised that none of your readers knew that Tom Stoppard wrote a play entitled THE DOG IT WAS THAT DIED. The protagonist is caught up in a recursive loop of counter-espionage and is probably man and mad dog wrapped up into one. (The dog that DOES die is a barge dog, not mad at all.) Given that the subject is spies and the author is Stoppard, one has to imagine that the author was familiar with THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. If YOU do not remember, when the protagonist is asked what he believes in, he replies, “I believe that the Number 10 bus will take me to Islington.”
Literature communicates,
Steve Smoliar
Elizabeth Wilby Harvey · 9 January 2007
I also came to this site because I have just finished reading Somerset Maugham’s “The Painted Veil”. - And I must admit I am still puzzled at the meaning of “It was the dog that died” ……. Uttered by Walter on his death bed ….
William ferguson · 17 January 2007
I have done the same as Claudia. I just finished The Painted Veil” last night.
William Ferguson
Florida
kalonica · 23 February 2007
Hi claudia?
If you want, you can read what I just wrote about this line in the W. Somerset Maugham novel….
[broken link] http://gwendfortuna.diaryland.com/paintedveil.html
I followed the Wikipedia entry to the blue Oliver Goldsmith page too. After I’d written my review, I saw your comment there and thought you might appreciate reading it.
Ahhh, the internet can be fun!
g
JoyMrgn262 · 9 March 2007
3/10/2007
Saw the reference to the poem in Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil. Had to look up the poem to read the entire thing. I’m lost as to exactly what the heck Maugham was referring to. In the book on my copy it is page 199 it says “the dog it was that died.”
I’m of two minds here. At first in the poem as put up beside the book, I think it is referring to the book’s two main characters. Then at the end and even in the middle of the poem I think the character in the book is referring perhaps to the cholera epidemic.
Your thoughts?
I’m reading the book for my book group which meets on Monday, March 19, 2007, at Annie Bloom’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon, USA, to discuss the book. If you’re in town, stop by. We meet at 7:30pm.
A bientot.
Joy Morgan
CYNGREVE · 23 March 2007
I, too came to this page from The Painted Veil. I like Walter now even better than I did while reading the book. Maugham doesn’t tell us if his wife ever looked up the quote.
cynthia
Morgan Wyche · 24 March 2007
I think a number of others, in having read The Painted Veil, esp after the film’s debut, will be looking into this site. Why? Because in the story, Walter Fane’s dying words are a quotation from poem’s last line but with little explanation to follow. However, as the story is about a woman’s spiritual journey, it is as if Somerset Maugham has set his reader on a small quest to find out more when the story seems finished. What might be behind the ‘Painted Veil’ may be what is concealed behind the story!
I saw the ‘dog’ as how Walter Fane first viewed his wife, but came to see it as himself before he died. Though he had been described in virtuous terms of having saved lives, he had still brought his wife into a choleric area in the hope that she would die of it. In contrast to him, Kitty Fane had first been cruel and had an affair that broke her husband’s heart, but she becomes changed by the humility of nuns, enough to ‘grow up’. It becomes Kitty, who was portrayed as undeserving, who will be enlivened with pregnancy, whilst Walter, once of ability ‘to comfort friends and foes’ will be the one who will die of cholera!
It is as if Fanes’ last words is a suggestion that Maugham intended a twist to the tale. People, it seems, can be changed through suffering and may even be enriched by it. The wife, we learn, is forgiven through the use of self depreciation. Fane has become ‘the dog’ who must die because he effectively bit his wife in having once calculated her death. And though after his death Kitty goes on with a spiritual journey that continues to make her grow up, she never does find out that Walter had forgiven because unlike us, she never did seek out the meaning of the poem to make the connection with why her husband would ever have quoted from it!
Jeanie Faulkner · 25 March 2007
The Painted Veil sent me here too. But who did the “mad dog” bite –? Kitty?
Jeanie Faulkner
Kramer Debora · 9 April 2007
Our book club is reading The Painted Veil and the reference in the story to this poem led me to this site. The point of the poem lent a great deal to understanding Walter’s frame of mind regarding Kitty. I think Kitty was right, he should have forgiven her.
Debora L. Kramer, PhD
Roswell Park Cancer Institute
Pharmacology and Therapeutics
Elm and Carlton St.
Buffalo, NY 14263
ph:fax:
Dave & Barbara Taylor · 30 May 2007
I, also, came to this site after reading the Painted Veil. I wanted to find some notation of forgiveness and mercy in Walter’s last words. This quotation gives none. Instead, it shows Walter as dying with the retained bitterness and an over-inflated opinion of his own worth. After all, his actions were motivated not by a love of the humanity he served in the cholera epidemic, but a detached scientific interest and malice toward his wife.
Janine Kelley · 30 May 2007
The dying words of the brilliant and admired, though tragically unloved physician Walter Fane in the exquisite novel The Painted Veil were The dog it was that died. Perhaps the man symbolizes the corrupt, imperialistic society of British Hong Kong. Or perhaps the man represents Kitty who possesses such a shallow heart that she is incapable of loving a man as fine and as good as Walter. Walter is also a bacteriologist. His fatal disease was his unrequited love for Kitty. The man in Goldsmith’s elegy might also be the feckless education system that young women in Britain suffered in the 1920’s. The author Somerset Maugham was unflinching in his study of human nature. It could just be that Walter was both man and dog, for his motives in going to the cholera-infested Chinese village were not wholly pure. Did he bring his fragile wife to the cholera infested village so she would die and be punished for her adultery? Human motives are complex. A Romantic, was Walter still trying to protect the immature Kitty and, quite possibly, awaken what was good, what was fine in her dormant soul? In the film Walter succeeded and Kitty discovers both her soul and true heart. Given the opportunity, Kitty was capable of being more than a pretty face. In the novel, the reader is left to wonder why Kitty simply could not love her husband who possesses such a brave and noble heart. I did. At the end of the novel, Kitty becomes somewhat of a nun caring gratefully for her long neglected father, foreswearing her sexual identity, hoping to raise her unborn daughter to be free. I shall never quite forgive her for not telling Walter that she loved him on his deathbed. Even if she didn’t. As her name implies, Kitty never quite grows up, though she undergoes a transformation of sorts. Kind too late. Still Maugham’s novel, in some ways, surpasses Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. At least the beautiful wife seeking love in all the wrong beds did not die a wretched death. In the end, all three are punished for their sexuality. It is worth noting that Somerset Maugham’s original surname for Walter was Lane. Kitty’s marriage to Walter was a pathway or lane to her better self. Janine Kelley
“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library,” the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges reflected.
Marty Sommercamp · 10 June 2007
What does this poem mean or symbolize? I just finished reading THE PAINTED VEIL and the last line are the final words of one of the main characters when he dies. It is driving me crazy to find the connection!!
Walter and Faith · 14 January 2008
This writer seems to me to be emphasizing our need to forgive…for if we do not …we are the ones who will suffer and find no peace. The Holy Bible teaches the same. As human beings…we MUST forgive those who do us wrong (as Jesus did) for holding it will “poison” us. Somerset Maughm illustrates this in his novel The Painted Veil … a genius he must have been. F Faith & Skip (Walter) Wainwright
Kathi McIntire · 17 May 2008
Same here, Claudia - just finished Maugham’s masterful work. Further proof of WSM’s genius is leading us to further research and a whole new author, Goldsmith, to enjoy.
Thanks for the site!
kathi in TN
Noam Ofek · 17 May 2008
I also just finished reading Maugham’s The Painted Veil.
Claudia, I pray explain to me (for English is not my mother’s tongue):
In Maugham’s book was Walter the dog? Was his trial to make Kitty infected with cholera his “bite” ?
Do you recommend any other book of Maugham’s?
Lizu Ofek, Jerusalem, Israel.