Essay Questions

What is the key irony about the poem?

The poem's title, and therefore its entire premise, suggests that if the common people ever started a revolution, there would be no media coverage of it, because the media would be too intertwined with the government that they would not dare to show the reality of the situation as it unfolded. Whilst this might be true of a Communist nation, such as China or Cuba, where the media are essentially the propaganda arm of the the ruling party, current times show the premise to be completely untrue when it comes to a free society such as the United States.

The media in the United States are almost a rival party to the government rather than being an arm, or a tentacle, of them. They are also given to hyping events up to a level that they do not actually have on their own - who can forget the television footage of a weather channel reporter clinging by his fingertips to a lamp post as the hurricane force winds tried to blow him away, as the camera also caught a glimpse of three men in the background strolling easily down the sidewalk? The media has a tendency to elevate everything that happens to a level of near hysteria, and in the event of a revolution by the people would be at the forefront making it seem that more people were involved in the revolution that there actually were, and giving an exaggerated picture of what was happening in reality. Far from hiding the events, they would magnify them until they were barely recognizable.

Why is this poem sometimes not considered a poem?

There has long been a debate about song lyrics, and not just these. Is a song a poem? Is a song a poem set to music? What makes a poem a poem and a song a song? The line between poetry and song lyrics is a difficult one to discern; John Lennon re-worked Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a love song to Yoko Ono, making it hard to tell which version was a poem and which was not. This poem began its life as a song lyric, but as time has gone by, and the content of the poem is given greater weight than its category or genre, it is more common to see it accepted as both.