I Wanted To Overthrow The Government - Analysis

Revolution as a Story Men Tell While Living Otherwise

Bukowski’s poem argues, with a bruised kind of humor, that the real force that defeats political revolution is not police power or ideology but the ordinary weakness of individual people: desire, fatigue, bodily failure, boredom, and self-protective selfishness. The speaker begins amid grand talk—people who insist you are a dupe for the state, who urge him to read your history and study systems that are allegedly ancient as 23,000 years. But the poem steadily drags those big abstractions down into the small rooms where actual lives happen: a tailor sewing, a pharmacist guarding his marriage, a couch with a spilled martini. By the end, the speaker’s political appetite has narrowed to a single certainty: he will need to get very drunk again.

The Mock-Mythic Hunt: Dogs, Horses, One Fox

The poem opens with a strange little emblem: 30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses and one fox. It reads like a folk tale or a medieval hunt, a ritual of power where many bodies and instruments pursue a single target. That imbalance is important: the state (or the organized crowd) has numbers, momentum, tradition; the fox has speed and instinct. The speaker immediately sets this image beside the rhetoric of radicals and reformers—those voices that diagnose church, state, racial war, money. The clash sets the poem’s tone: skeptical, a little amused, and already impatient with anyone who speaks like a pamphlet.

That opening hunt also prefigures the end, when the same lines return almost verbatim. The repetition makes the chase feel cyclical—less a unique historical struggle than a permanent pattern, a machine that keeps running even as individual plotters die, age, or lose interest.

The Tailor and the Pharmacist: Conspiracy in Domestic Light

The speaker’s memory takes us to an oddly intimate scene of rebellion: an old Jewish tailor with his nose in the lamplight, and an Italian pharmacist in an expensive apartment. The details matter because they make the conspiracy feel small, almost cozy, even as they claim they will overthrow a tottering dynasty. One man sews buttons on a vest; the other waves a cigar so close it ends up in my eye. Revolution, in this room, is not barricades—it’s talk among men who are still bound to their trades, their homes, their habits, their irritations.

The speaker includes himself without heroism: he is always drunk as possible, well-read, starving, and depressed. Even the confession that a good young piece of ass would have fixed his rancor reframes his politics as misdirected need. The poem doesn’t deny that systems oppress; it implies that the speaker’s revolutionary pose partly covers private hunger—sexual, emotional, and bodily.

Where the Plot Fails: Not Big Enough, Not Small Enough

The poem’s crucial admission arrives bluntly: somewhere we missed. Bukowski refuses the satisfying explanation—no heroic betrayal, no clear villain. Instead the failure is muddy and humiliating: we were not men enough, not large or small enough, or maybe they only wanted to talk or were simply bored. This is one of the poem’s sharpest tensions: the men can articulate grand grievances, but their capacity to act dissolves into vague inadequacy. The very language stutters into alternatives, as if the speaker can’t bear to name one clean cause because the cause is diffuse: character, temperament, entropy.

Even the speaker’s earlier noir-ish excursion—down dark alleys smoking borrowed cigarettes, watching the backs of houses burn—doesn’t become a sustained campaign. It’s more like a mood. The poem suggests that revolutionary identity can be performed like a style (darkness, fire, cigarettes) while the world remains stubbornly itself.

The Turn into the Personal: Overthrowing a Marriage Instead

The poem pivots from public overthrow to private betrayal. The Italian becomes angry because the speaker stayed with his wife while he went down to the pharmacy. That line quietly exposes a key irony: the pharmacist may fantasize about overthrowing a dynasty, but he refuses to have his personal government overthrown. In other words, he’ll denounce power in theory while clinging to power at home. The wife overthrew easy, and the speaker’s guilt is sharply grounded: the children were asleep in the next room. This is not just moral mess; it’s the poem’s argument in miniature. The revolution that actually happens is sexual and domestic, and it creates immediate consequences—hurt, secrecy, shame—unlike the abstract revolution that never materialized.

The speaker’s escape—winning $200 in a crap game, taking a bus to New Orleans, standing on a corner listening to bar music—feels like a drift into sensation. Where ideology demanded discipline, the speaker chooses chance, travel, alcohol, and sound. The tone becomes lonelier here: the poem stops sneering and starts to brood.

A Bladder Saves Manhattan: The Body as the Final Authority

The memory of the tailor’s death tightens the poem into something bleakly comic and, at the same time, devastating. The tailor, the speaker realizes, was stronger than any of us, yet he gave way because his bladder would not go on. The phrasing reduces human fate to an organ that fails. Then comes the poem’s most audacious leap: maybe that bodily failure saved Wall Street and Manhattan, the Church, Rome, the Left Bank. It’s funny in its exaggeration, but the logic is serious: history can hinge on the least heroic limits, on flesh rather than principle. Systems endure partly because their enemies get tired, get sick, have to go to the bathroom, die.

Ideas as Governments, Desire as the Real Coup

Near the end, the speaker delivers the poem’s clearest statement: the weakness was not Government but Man, and men are never as strong as their ideas. The twist that follows—ideas were governments turned into men—is bitterly elegant. It suggests that ideology isn’t the opposite of power; it’s power condensed into a human mind, recruiting a person to act as its agent. In that light, the speaker’s surrender to sex is not simply a distraction; it’s a competing sovereignty. The pharmacist’s wife is tired of bombs under the pillow and hissing the Pope, and the poem lets us feel her exhaustion with performative radicalism. What replaces it is not virtue but appetite: a couch, a spilled martini, then the bedroom.

The language yokes sex to politics—desire, revolution—and then undercuts both with nonsense ended. It’s as if the poem admits that the only revolution that reliably happens is the one that ends talk, ends posing, and returns people to their bodies.

The Hunt Returns, and the Speaker Returns to Drink

The poem closes by snapping back to the opening chase: 30 dogs and 20 men chase one fox across sunlit fields. The return implies the world’s indifference; the machinery of pursuit continues regardless of this speaker’s failed conspiracies and compromised desires. Against that bright, archetypal image, the final actions are deliberately unheroic: he gets out of bed, yawned, scratched my belly, and anticipates getting very drunk again. The tone here is not triumphant cynicism but resignation—an acknowledgment that his cycles (hungers, guilt, intoxication) may be as repetitive as the state’s own chase.

A Hard Question the Poem Won’t Let Go

If the tailor’s bladder can save Wall Street, then what would real resistance even look like—something that can survive boredom, lust, sickness, and the desire to protect one’s own personal government? The poem’s cruelest implication is that any politics that requires people to be better than they are will be defeated by the very material it’s made of: men, one at a time.