Archy was a modern poetry cockroach: a human vers-libre poet who “died and went / into a cockroach’s body,” as he explains in a 1927 poem called “the cockroach who had been to hell.” Having transmigrated in this way, the poor cockroach could write only by throwing himself at the keys of a typewriter, which created some eccentricities of capitalization and punctuation. But on he pressed, from 1916 through 1935, giving America’s readers the benefit of his take on public events, his friends (especially an alley cat named Mehitabel), and the power of art.

Or so at least we were told by Don Marquis (1878–1937), a columnist for The New York Sun, who created Archy in 1916 as a character who offered tidbits and poetry that he could feature in his column. Marquis first collected the poems in book form in the 1927 “archy and mehitabel,” illustrated by George Herriman (creator of the Krazy Kat comic strip). Two later volumes would follow — “archys life of mehitabel” (1933) and “archy does his part” (1935) — after Marquis had moved to the Tribune.

This past summer, we selected “archy confesses” as Poem of the Day, although it was really a rhymed and metered poem. Today’s poem, one of the lighter verses the Sun offers on Wednesdays, is much more straightforwardly vers libre: a free verse account of moth who, in Archy’s view, is too intent on frying himself on electric lights — and yet, “at the same time i wish / there was something i wanted / as badly.”

The Lesson of the Moth
by Don Marquis

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

archy

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.