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.”