The Lesson of the Moth

“First Fig” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1920)

Edna St. Vincent Millay is a contemporary of Marquis’s. In her short poem “First Fig,” she takes a stance on beauty similar to Marquis’s moth. Like the moth who is willing to be consumed by the flame because of the beautiful light it gives, Millay’s speaker takes the old phrase “burning the candle at both ends,” which is usually used to signify overwork, and inverts its meaning. Though burning the candle at both ends is destructive to the candle, Millay’s speaker instead focuses on the “lovely light” (Line 4) the act provides.

“The Coming of Archy” by Don Marquis (1927)

“The Coming of Archy” is the first of Marquis’s Archy poems, and it provides the metatextual information that contemporary readers of “The Sun Dial” may have known when encountering “the lesson of the moth.” The poem’s introduction establishes that Archy is a cockroach who uses Marquis’s typewriter to write his poems and that the works he writes are “all in / lower case, because Archy could not / operate the shift key” (Lines 8-10). “The Coming of Archy” does not have the same philosophical depth as “the lesson of the moth,” but the tone and point of view each poem provides is very similar.

“Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495” by Ern Malley (1944

Ern Malley, like Marquis’s Archy, is a fictional poet. Instead of a cockroach, however, Malley was a human modernist poet dreamed up by poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart. Stewart and McAuley wrote mock versions of modernist poems under the name of Ern Malley in the hopes of undermining modernist poetry. The works of Ern Malley became more successful and controversial than anything Stewart or McAuley ever wrote individually.

Though the Malley poems are now understood to be a hoax, they are nevertheless celebrated as powerful examples of surrealist persona poems. “the lesson of the moth” and “Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495” stand at opposite ends of what the persona poem can do, both in terms of tone and subject matter.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot (1915)

T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is one of the most well-known modernist persona poems. Like “the lesson of the moth,” Eliot’s poem hinges on simple narrative interactions that expand into deep philosophical considerations. The form and structure of Eliot’s poem, as well as its semi-serious engagement with the aforementioned philosophical questions, is a case-study in modernist poetics.

“The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams (1923)

William Carlos Williams is among the modernist poets most associated with the lower-case format that Marquis employs with Archy.

Though, on the surface, “The Red Wheelbarrow” seems to share few of the concerns of Marquis’s “the lesson of the moth,” both poets take an interest in a commonplace object or moment that would often be overlooked. Marquis pays this interest through Archy’s unique cockroach point of view, while Williams pays his through the poem’s open claim that “so much depends / upon” (Lines 1-2) the scene he presents. Marquis and Williams also take a keen interest in certain tools and their role in civilization (another common element of modernism). Marquis is interested in tools such as the “electric light bulb” (Line 4), while William meditates on “a red wheel / barrow” (Lines 3-4).