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.