What Can We Do - Analysis

A bleak thesis: Humanity as a sleeping beast

Bukowski’s central claim is blunt: what we call Humanity is mostly not a moral community but a heavy, half-conscious creature, occasionally capable of tenderness, yet structurally tilted toward harm. He grants a narrow opening at the start: at their best there is gentleness, some understanding, even acts of courage. But that concession functions less like praise than like a diagnostic baseline—rare symptoms that don’t change the underlying body. The dominant image that follows, a mass, a glob, strips Humanity of individuality and judgment. It is not a collection of people making choices; it is a single sluggish organism.

When awakened, it doesn’t become wise

The poem’s most chilling move is the way it treats activation as a danger rather than a hope. The “large animal” is deep in sleep, and almost nothing can awaken it; you might expect awakening to mean enlightenment. Instead, when it does wake, it is best at brutality: selfishness, unjust judgments, murder. That list is important because it climbs from everyday vice to absolute violence, suggesting a continuum rather than an exception. In this view, the everyday moral failures of crowds—quick verdicts, self-protection, the pleasure of punishment—are not separate from extreme outcomes; they are the same machinery, simply turned up.

Poison, law, and the trap of self-protection

After asking what can we do, the speaker answers nothing, then pivots into a survival manual: avoid the thing, treat it as poisonous and mindless. The tension here is sharp: he calls Humanity mindless, yet he immediately warns that it is cunning enough to defend itself. It has enacted laws to protect itself from you, and it can kill you without cause. This contradiction is the poem’s nerve: a crowd may be stupid in its impulses, but it is institutional in its power. Bukowski isn’t mainly worried about one violent person; he’s worried about an organized consensus that can punish noncompliance while calling that punishment justice.

Escape as stealth, not victory

To survive, you must be subtle. That word changes the scale of the poem: the enemy is too large for confrontation, so the only imaginable freedom is evasive—quiet, private, almost criminal. Yet Bukowski refuses to romanticize this, too. few escape, and even the instruction figure a plan sounds grimly bureaucratic, like drafting an exit strategy from a burning building that has locked doors. The poem’s tone here is not triumphant rebellion; it is wary, streetwise, and exhausted, as if the speaker has seen many brave gestures get absorbed, neutralized, or crushed.

Greatness that can’t get outside the cage

One of the poem’s smartest barbs is its dismissal of status as a false exit. The speaker has met the great and famous, but they have not escaped, because their greatness exists within Humanity. This is not just cynicism about celebrities; it’s an argument that recognition is one of the trap’s rewards. If your value is conferred by the very mass you’re trying to flee, then your success becomes another form of captivity. The poem suggests that what looks like transcendence—fame, achievement, power—may simply be a higher-ranking role inside the same sleeping animal.

The final turn: failing to escape, refusing to stop

The last lines shift from indictment to confession: I have not escaped, but I have not failed in trying. That pairing is paradoxical and humanizing. He rejects the external measure (escape as a completed act) and substitutes an internal one (trying as a way of living). The closing hope—before my death to obtain my life—clarifies what escape really means here: not leaving society physically, but recovering a self that isn’t administered by the crowd’s judgments and laws. The poem ends on a thin, stubborn thread of agency: even if Humanity is a brute mass, a person can still attempt to claim a life that belongs to them.

A sharper question the poem leaves us with

If avoid is the only advice, what counts as avoidance without turning into another kind of death? The speaker wants to obtain his life, yet his world teaches him to move subtle, to hide, to minimize contact. The poem’s ache is that the same tactics that keep you safe from the “mass” might also starve the very life you’re trying to win.