The Rebel by D. J. Enright
Quick answer: The Rebel by D. J. Enright explained: stanza by stanza summary, theme of nonconformity, tone and irony, plus NCERT Class 7 question answers and study notes.
Some poems about rebellion come armed with slogans. D. J. Enright's 'The Rebel' arrives with a grin instead. Written by a British poet who spent much of his career teaching literature in Egypt, Japan, Singapore and Thailand, it sits in the NCERT Class 7 Honeycomb reader, where it reliably gets the biggest laugh of the term. The poem sketches a figure who does the opposite of whatever everyone around him is doing: hair, clothes, conversation, pets, even opinions about the weather. Nothing dramatic happens in it. The comedy lives entirely in the pattern.
Enright, born in 1920 and loosely associated with the plain-speaking Movement poets of 1950s Britain, distrusted grand gestures, and that distrust shapes every line here. The poem never tells you whether its rebel is a hero, a nuisance or a fraud. It lays out the evidence in matching pairs and lets you judge, right up to a final stanza that changes the rules. This guide walks through the poem, its deadpan machinery, and the questions exams ask.
What the poem says
The poem is a catalogue of contrariness. When everybody around him wears short hair, the rebel lets his grow long; the moment long hair becomes the fashion, he cuts his short. When the whole class talks during the lesson, he sits silent; when nobody says a word, he creates a disturbance. He dresses in wild clothes among the soberly dressed and in sober clothes among the flamboyant. In the company of dog lovers he announces a preference for cats, and among cat lovers he puts in a good word for dogs.
The pattern extends even to things nobody can control. When everyone praises the sunshine, the rebel points out how badly rain is needed; when everyone welcomes the rain, he mourns the missing sun. Whatever the crowd attends, he skips; whatever the crowd skips, he attends. Then comes the poem's quiet ambush. In the closing lines the speaker steps out from behind the catalogue and offers two flat statements: it is a good thing that societies have rebels, and you may not find it such a good thing to be one. The joke suddenly has a cost attached.
A pattern of opposites, pair by pair
Exams often ask students to reproduce the situations, so hold the pairs in order. Each stanza is a small see-saw: the crowd on one end, the rebel on the other.
How it works: the craft behind the comedy
Technically the poem is free verse, without rhyme or a fixed metre, and that is a deliberate choice. Its music comes from grammar. Nearly every stanza runs on the same conditional frame: a clause describing what everybody does, followed by a clause describing what the rebel does instead. Repetition with tiny variation is one of the oldest engines of comedy, and Enright runs it with a straight face. The narrator never smirks, never editorialises, never uses an adjective where a plain noun will do. Deadpan delivery is what lets the absurdity accumulate.
The deeper craft is the irony folded inside the structure itself. A true nonconformist is unpredictable, but this rebel is the most predictable person in the poem: tell Enright what the crowd is doing and he can tell you exactly what the rebel will do. Opposition this automatic is just conformity wearing a costume. The form makes that argument silently, through pattern, long before the final stanza says anything out loud. When the last two lines shift from description to judgment, and to a pointed 'you', the poem lands its only punch, precisely because everything before was so evenly balanced.
Is the rebel really a rebel? A character sketch
For a character sketch question, the honest answer has two layers. On the surface, the rebel is independent minded, unafraid of disapproval, and immune to fashion. He will not be herded. Classrooms tend to admire that, and the poem lets them. Underneath, though, Enright plants a doubt: the rebel holds no visible principles. He does not prefer cats; he prefers disagreeing. His identity depends entirely on the crowd he claims to ignore, the way a shadow depends on a body.
The kindest reading says he performs a public service: groups drift into lazy consensus, and someone who always argues the other side keeps everyone honest. The harsher reading says he is vain and exhausting to know. Enright endorses both at once, and the last stanza holds the two ideas together: rebels are valuable, and being one is lonely work.
Why it lasts
Fashion in nonconformity dates quickly; the poem about it has not, because Enright aimed at the mechanism rather than the costume. Every generation rediscovers the paradox that its most defiant styles are worn by thousands of people simultaneously. Teenagers meet this poem at exactly the age when identity feels like a choice between joining and refusing, which is why it has held its place in school anthologies for decades.
It also lasts because the satire cuts both ways: the crowd is faceless and a little sheeplike, the rebel ridiculous and a little brave. Enright refuses to hand either side a victory, and poems that refuse to preach tend to outlive poems that do. The final couplet's tone, sympathetic and warning at once, reads differently at fourteen and at forty, which is a fair working definition of a classic.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the see-saw. Build a poem from one repeating grammatical frame, change only the nouns each time, and trust the reader to feel the pattern without being told about it. It is astonishing how much comedy and how much menace this structure can carry, depending on the nouns you choose.
Steal the withheld verdict too. Enright saves his only opinion for the final two lines, and shifts to direct address at the same moment, so the ending feels like a hand on the reader's shoulder. Judges reading for creativity and structure, as Writory's do each month, tend to reward the exact moment a well-kept pattern deliberately breaks, so keep yours strict enough that the break means something.
Question answers for quick revision
These are the short answers the NCERT exercises and school tests most often expect, compressed for revision.
What poets can take from this
- Build a poem on one repeated sentence frame and change only the nouns each round.
- Keep the narrator deadpan; the flatter the delivery, the harder the absurdity works.
- Save your single moment of judgment for the last two lines.
- Switch to direct address exactly once, at the point of maximum pressure.
- Read each pair aloud and cut any stanza whose rhythm drags behind the others.
- Let structure carry the argument so you never have to state the moral early.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in paired opposites about a person who agrees with absolutely everyone, and let your final two lines quietly reveal what that agreement costs.
Questions
What is the theme of The Rebel by D. J. Enright?
The poem explores nonconformity and individuality, showing a person who always opposes the majority. Its deeper theme is double edged: society genuinely needs dissenters to keep it honest, yet opposition that becomes automatic is its own kind of conformity, and the rebel's position is a lonely one.
What is the tone of the poem The Rebel?
The tone is humorous, ironic and deliberately deadpan. Enright reports the rebel's contrary behaviour in a flat, even voice, and only in the final two lines does he allow a direct comment, which mixes sympathy with warning.
Does The Rebel have a rhyme scheme or metre?
No. The poem is written in free verse, without rhyme or regular metre. Its music comes instead from parallel structure: almost every stanza repeats the same grammatical pattern of what everybody does followed by what the rebel does.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.