The Fly

Though Shapiro was not deployed to the Pacific Theater until 1942, he wrote both “The Fly” and V-Letter in the midst of the second World War (1939-1945). Informed by these world events, “The Fly” grapples with a deadly battle of a different scale, but its diminutive scope and subject play out a miniature war that mirrors many of the life-and-death struggles of the second World War. The poem’s heightened language (see: Literary Devices) establishes the speaker’s encounter with the fly as a large-scale conflict, and in shifting the scale of the battlefield, the speaker finds himself taking the fly’s perspective and learning to sympathize with the creature.

The poem constantly employs various metaphors and images that play with the fly’s filthiness and scale. The first stanza describes the creature as a “little bat, the size of snot” (Line 1). In addition to suggesting the fly’s diminutive size relative to the speaker, the words “bat” and “snot” also point toward the speaker’s view of the fly an abject and filthy; bats are common carriers of disease, and snot is an unhygienic human waste product. Later, the speaker states outright that the fly has a “filth of hair” (Line 9) and is “[s]hod in disease” (Line 19). The associations establish the fly as a corruptive force (See: Themes) that endangers the speaker despite the obvious size difference.

The speaker further dramatizes the fly’s size by taking its perspective, imagining that his plate of food appears to the fly as “smoking mountains” (Line 6). Likewise, the air generated from the horse’s tail amounts to a “hurricane” (Line 18). Even the “sticky paper” (Line 28) that women set up to trap the fly is likened to “fens [...] and quicksands” (Line 28). In the last stanza, the speaker changes tactics and likens himself to “Gargantua” (Line 41), the man-eating giant and father of Pantagruel in Francois Rabelais’s 1562 satire The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel.

The speaker’s identification with Gargantua establishes him as “a man” (Line 33) and a patriarchal figure, while children and women are also engaged in the war against the fly, each emulating a different military division. The children act “like spiders” (Line 26), while “wives resort to chemistry of war” (Line 27), or chemical warfare. The aforementioned “great horse” (Line 17) also suggests cavalry units. A man, if a father, would serve as commander.

The comparison between children and “spiders” (Line 26), however, suggests a narrow gap between the human and the insect. The speaker struggles throughout the poem to maintain this gap but often slips, humanizing the fly through his descriptions. He describes the fly’s skin, for instance, as “shabby clothes” (Line 2) or “flimsy clothes” (Line 39), indicating the speaker’s larger struggle: He attempts to diminish the fly by calling it “shabby” or “flimsy,” but nevertheless humanizes it by clothing it. The speaker demonstrates this struggle when describing the fly’s actions, too. He ascribes the creature agency and intention by placing “to” at the beginning of “To populate the stinking cat […]” (Line 3).

The most prominent instances of the speaker’s sympathy come when he describes the fly’s struggle in the “fens of sticky paper” (Line 28) and when he describes the fly’s “maggots like a jewel” (Line 16). On the sticky paper, the speaker imagines the fly “struggl[ing] hideously and beg[ging]” (Line 30) to be released. Unable to free itself, the fly then “amputates [its] leg” (Line 31). The speaker’s description of the fly’s maggots are subtler. Despite the bloated, “tight belly of the dead” (Line 14) and other morbid imagery preceding the maggots, the speaker describes them as “like a jewel” (Line 16). This simile creates a vivid and humorous irony, playing with a contrast between the grotesque and the glamorous, the repulsive and the regal. This irony complements and underscores the ongoing tension between the world of humans and that of insects; the speaker’s disgust with the beast appears inseparable from his identification with it.

The speaker appears to be aware of this conflict in the fifth stanza. After imagining the fly’s struggle on the sticky paper, the speaker justifies his actions by stating, “But I, a man, must swat you with my hate” (Line 33). This line might suggest that the methods undertaken by women and children are too genteel to match the speaker’s masculine ideals, but the line is ultimately subject to the poem’s defining tone of irony, and the poem becomes a critique of “man” as much as a critique of the fly: While the patriarchal emphasis suggests a unique warlikeness to masculinity (or perhaps a unique masculinity to war), and while the poem’s historical context buttresses this association, it also implicitly brings the word “man” beyond its gendered trappings to denote humanity at large. The insect may infuriate the speaker, but the creature’s repugnance is bound up to its efforts to live—to eat, to procreate, to be animate. In contrast, the humans in the poem are all motivated by a desire to kill—a desire that, because the fly is so personified, resembles murderousness. The line most crystalizing this idea is Line 25, which states that “[the speaker’s] peace is [the fly’s] disaster” (Line 25). This variance between fly and “man”—the former pursuing life while the latter destroys it—ultimately creates an incriminating foil, with humanity appearing less human than the fly. Only humankind is capable of a World War, yet the gravity of this premise is still counterbalanced by levity; there is inherent comedy in comparing this quotidian drama to death on a global scale. The speaker’s description of the fly “tak[ing] to bed a wife” (Line 8) further demonstrates the masculine but ultimately human connection he feels with the creature, but even in the most one-sided struggles, the poem suggests, shared sympathies exist among the combatants.