19 pages • 38-minute read
The Lesson of the Moth
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“the lesson of the moth” is a persona poem told from the perspective of Archy—a cockroach who, in a previous life, was a free-verse poet. True to Archy’s past-life experience, “the lesson of the moth” is written in free verse, a form of poetry first popularized by Walt Whitman and that became a critical component of the modernist movement. Free verse, in general, follows no strict formal rules—but that does not mean it is completely unstructured. Rather, free verse poems use idiosyncratic structures that enhance particular aspects of the poem. Stanza breaks in “the lesson of the moth,” for example, are dictated by a change in speaker rather than a number of lines. Because of this removal of traditional formal structures, free verse is generally seen as a truer expression of the author’s poetic intention.
The “truth” of Marquis’s poetic intention may be undermined by Archy as a narrative device. Many of the formal decisions that led to “the lesson of the moth” were made in order to fit Archy’s narrative frame, and so these formal elements are not to be understood as “free” in the same way.
The poem’s particularities, however, still inform its proper reading. There is a distinct relationship between Archy’s writing style and his championing of “sense” (Line 14). Even if one accepts the explanation that Archy is too small to press the shift key, the poem’s free-verse form still lacks punctuation, one of the main grammatical units that helps make “sense” of a collection of written words. The lack of punctuation in addition to the enjambment that often separates the subject and object of a sentence results in a poem that is sometimes ambiguous. Lines 7 to 9, for example, could be read either as Archy asking if the moth behaves out of convention or as Archy asking the moth about his behavior because it is a conventional thing for moths to do and Archy is curious.
While these failures of sense do not disrupt Archy’s reason within the poem, they work to reinforce the moth’s suggestion that sometimes “we get tired / of using” (Lines 16-17) sense.
Allegory
A literary allegory is a narrative form that uses the representation of a character or event to make a broader point. Often the goal of an allegory is to present moral or political truths because narrative forms can convey complex ideas relatively simply. Old allegories, like those from Aesop’s Fables, often use personified animals as characters to represent certain types of people or to contrast certain ideas. The story of the tortoise and the hair, for example, uses animal characters to present the lesson that “slow and steady wins the race.”
“the lesson of the moth” borrows many of these tropes from traditional allegories and even includes the word “lesson” in the title to solidify its status as an allegory. In true modernist fashion, however, “the lesson of the moth” does not have a clean takeaway that can be applied outside of the poem. Unlike with traditional allegories, the narratives of which are told from a third-person perspective, Marquis tells “the lesson of the moth” from Archy’s point of view. Archy gets the final say in the work. Archy’s disagreement with the moth in the penultimate stanza, therefore, complicates the allegorical work that Marquis set up.
Point of View
While “the lesson of the moth” favors dialogue over imagery, it uses its character’s speech to great ironic effect. Much of this ironic contrast comes down to the differences in Archy’s and the moth’s viewpoints. Because their natural instincts are so different from one another, Archy and the moth spend a lot of time speaking their own perspective and little time communicating with one another.
In blatant parallel to the insects’ most basic contrast—a cockroach is entirely earthbound, while a moth is the loftier creature—a prime example of the two characters’ perspectives creating an ironic distance is in how they describe the aftermath of the moth’s immolation. Archy calls the result “a small unsightly cinder” (Line 14), dismissing the idea that there is any potential for beauty in the act. The moth, meanwhile, believes that he is to be “burned up with beauty” (Line 27). In the poem’s final line, Archy refers to the moth’s transcendent impulse as “want[ing] to fry himself” (Line 53). The diction solidifies the poem’s comic tone.
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