An elegy is supposed to make us mourn someone admirable, and Goldsmith spends nearly the whole poem steering us toward the wrong funeral. The title promises the death of a mad dog, yet for seven stanzas our attention rests on a man we are urged to admire, until the final line pulls the rug away. What looks like a lament is a joke at the expense of empty praise, and of the crowd that hurries to hand it out.
The opening sets the tone. "Good people all, of every sort, / Give ear unto my song" sounds like a street singer gathering an audience, and the stanza promptly teases that audience: if the song is "wondrous short, / It cannot hold you long." It is a small joke, but it shows the poem's method, a solemn formula collapsing into plain common sense. The same trick drives the portrait of the man from Islington. "That still a godly race he ran— / Whene'er he went to pray." The dash is the hinge, with praise on one side and deflation on the other. His godliness, it turns out, applies only while he is actually praying. The next stanza tightens the move: "The naked every day he clad— / When he put on his clothes." Charity shrinks to getting dressed. Because the first half of each stanza sounds so convincing, the second half drops like a trapdoor.
The form makes this work. The quatrains alternate eight- and six-syllable lines, rhymed ABAB, the bouncing pattern of a popular ballad. That regularity sounds trusting, even naive, which is exactly what deadpan satire needs. The rhythm never winks, so the reader has to do the laughing. Goldsmith also borrows the habits of a lazy ballad-maker. "As many dogs there be" seems to exist only to rhyme with "degree," and the roll-call of "mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound, / And curs of low degree" lends the vocabulary of social rank to animals.
Then the dog acquires a human mind. The two were friends "at first," until "a pique began," and the dog acted "to gain some private ends." Pique and private ends belong to petty quarrels and scheming, not to animals. "Went mad, and bit the man" is flat and quick, as if madness were a tactic. The comedy lies in how much motive is invented for a creature that cannot explain itself.
The real targets, though, are the neighbours. They run in "wond'ring," and swear the dog "had lost its wits / To bite so good a man." Their logic is circular: the man's goodness, vouched for only by the poem's own jokes, becomes proof of the dog's madness. Then the verb returns: "while they swore the dog was mad, / They swore the man would die." The same word covers both verdicts, as though swearing could stand in for knowing. Even their sympathy is staged for display, since the wound looks "sore and sad / To every Christian eye." The man's piety showed only at prayer-time, and the crowd's compassion shows only when it has an audience.
The last stanza brings the reversal. "Wonder" echoes the "wondrous" of the first stanza and the neighbours' "wond'ring," but it now means a genuine surprise. The poem finally says outright what it has hinted at, calling the crowd "rogues" who "lied." Then comes the only exclamation mark in the poem: "The dog it was that died!" The title's promise is kept at the last possible moment, and the elegy turns out to be for the dog after all. We might feel a flicker of sympathy for the one creature who actually pays, and the poem never explains why the dog dies. That unexplained outcome adds a touch of absurdity to the joke.
The poem matters because it shows how form can be turned against content. It is a mock-elegy, so the expectations of the genre (grief, dignity, praise of the dead) are set up in order to be broken. For a student, it is a compact lesson in reading tone, in noticing a pattern, and in watching the moment it snaps. Its targets are still easy to recognise: praise that means nothing, and a crowd that is certain of what will happen and wrong about it.