What Can We Do?

Summary

Bukowski presents humanity as a contradictory force: capable of brief decency, yet usually driven by cruelty, selfishness, and blind impulse. The poem begins with a grudging acknowledgment that people can show gentleness, understanding, and courage, but that concession quickly collapses into a harsher verdict. Humanity becomes something huge, dull, and half-asleep, dangerous precisely because it is so difficult to wake or change.

The poem then turns from diagnosis to survival. The voice asks what can be done with humanity and answers with bleak practicality: avoid it, treat it like something toxic, and be wary of the systems it has created to defend itself. The final movement is deeply personal. The poem admits that escape may be impossible, even for the "great and famous," because fame still exists inside the same human machinery. What remains is a stubborn, unfinished struggle for self-possession, ending on the paradoxical hope of obtaining one's life before death.

Theme

• Human cruelty - The poem insists that brutality is not an exception to human nature but one of its most reliable expressions, especially when people act as a collective.
• Alienation from society - The voice stands apart from humanity, treating it as an external threat rather than a community to join or redeem.
• Powerlessness and survival - Instead of offering a solution, the poem frames existence as a matter of cautious endurance and strategic distance.
• Individual self-possession - The closing lines suggest that the only meaningful victory may be recovering a true self before death makes that impossible.
• Ambivalence about human goodness - The poem does not deny moments of kindness or courage, but it treats them as fragile exceptions within a much darker overall pattern.

Literary Devices

• Metaphor - Humanity is compared to a sleeping animal and to something poisonous, turning an abstract idea into a threatening physical presence.
• Simile - The comparison to "a large animal deep in sleep" emphasizes humanity's mass, inertia, and latent danger.
• Personification - Humanity is described as if it can act, protect itself, and kill, which makes the collective seem almost like a hostile organism.
• Repetition - The repeated use of "I have" in the closing lines underscores persistence, isolation, and weary determination.
• Irony - The poem undercuts the prestige of the "great and famous" by placing them inside the same flawed humanity they seem to transcend.
• Free verse - The loose, unadorned structure matches the poem's blunt judgments and unsentimental voice.
• Direct address - The question "what can we do" draws the reader into the problem and gives the poem the feel of a grim public statement.

Symbolism

• Humanity - More than the human race, it functions as a symbol of collective behavior, social systems, and the darker instincts that shape them.
• Large animal - This image symbolizes humanity as powerful but unconscious, capable of sudden violence when disturbed.
• Poisonous thing - The comparison suggests that society is something one must handle carefully because contact can be damaging or fatal.
• Laws - These represent the institutions and rules people create to preserve the very system that harms them.
• Death - The final reference to death marks the limit of time and the urgency of living authentically before it is too late.

Tone

Bukowski's tone is blunt, cynical, and defiant, with only a thin thread of hope running through the ending. He sounds unsparing in his judgment of collective human behavior, yet the poem is not merely resigned; it carries the energy of someone still fighting to remain free from what he condemns. The mood for the reader is bleak and tense, with a final note of stubborn endurance that keeps the poem from sinking entirely into despair.

Historical Context

Bukowski wrote from within the late twentieth-century American literary world, where postwar disillusionment, urban alienation, and distrust of institutions often shaped poetry outside the academic mainstream. His work is commonly associated with plainspoken language, anti-heroic attitudes, and a focus on damaged everyday life rather than idealized moral visions.

The poem also reflects a broader modern and postwar skepticism about crowds, systems, and the gap between civilization and behavior. Its vision of society as self-protective, violent, and difficult to escape fits well with the hard-edged social criticism found in much twentieth-century poetry, even as Bukowski gives it his own rough, intimate voice.

Similar Poems

• Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night - Dylan Thomas
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T. S. Eliot
• Invictus - William Ernest Henley
• Ozymandias - Percy Bysshe Shelley
• America - Allen Ginsberg