Grant Gallagher

9/28/15
Dr. Knapp
ENG 340
Close Reading of The Man-Moth
The Man-Moth is one of Elizabeth Bishops rare poetic meditations on the urban
environment. As she does later in her career through Night City, Bishop paints the city as
desperate and dark. The Man-Moth, however, is unique in Bishops work for its salient
portrayal of the individual navigating modernity. Through the evocative language and narrative
of the poem, Bishop untangles the web of civilization and puts us face to face with an alienated
creature who may be as much mirror as man or moth.
The stanzas of The Man-Moth do not adhere to a classical poetic form or strict pattern
of meter, but they do correspond to discrete movements within the titular characters fever dream
life. The stanzas establish the scene of the surface world, locate the Man-Moth underground,
bring him to the surface to chase the Moon, follow him back down, and present us with an
imagined encounter. Within the linear and ordered structure, however, we find content which is
confusing and creates a sense of longing. Perhaps this contrast is in parallel with the contrasting
lack of wholeness one feels while alienated in a world that is nonetheless rigid and totalizing.
The Man-Moths journey to the surface begins with anxiety, as he nervously begins to
scale the faces of the buildings. His nerves are not misplaced, as he believes himself to be on a
serious quest. His confusion has convinced him that the moon is a small hole at the top of the

sky, and for all his fear he feels naturally compelled to climb thinking that this time he will
manage to push his small head through that round clean opening. Is this some sort of libidinal
impulse, the quintessential moth drawn to light? It is certainly significant that the Man-Moths
imagined exit from society is bright, in contrast with the darkness of city and sky. However, there
is a case to be made for greater motivation behind the Man-Moths futile climb toward the moon.
Facets of the Man-Moths life told after his escape attempt reveal his motivations. His
experience of the underground, his so called home, is harrowing. At the start of the fourth stanza
the subway walls are described as pale, a laconic suggestion that the scenery is bleak. In this
bleak setting, confusion reigns as the Man-Moth flits,/...flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent
trains/fast enough to suit him. Though ostensibly designed for its passengers, the subway
system appears to have taken on an independent quality. The rigid schedule, the system, has
taken priority over the individuals within it. Why else would the doors close swiftly,? It is not
just the Man-Moths insect qualities which make him rush through the subway, it is the nature of
the place.
Once the Man-Moth has boarded the train [it] starts at once at its full, terrible
speed,/without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort. Such is the speed of an awful world
wherein the living are subordinate to the inanimate machinations of a system, established by
conscious beings but now simply reproducing itself autonomously into apparent infinity. Such is
the fate of the subway, and of the whole civil society which the Man-Moth is situated in. He
soars, unable to really place his speed, each night.../through artificial tunnels1. Each night,
contained in this machine, the Man-Moth also dreams recurrent dreams. The speaker notes that
these dreams underlie/his rushing brain like the rails beneath the train. What is the truly
1 emphasis mine

grotesque element of the poem? Is it the fluttering, dreaming, longing Man-Moth? Who dreams,
perhaps, of something better? The creature whose heart-wrenching emotional experience we
have followed and felt throughout the poem? No. It is the mechanical and colorless social order
which is portrayed as grotesque.
This revelation demands a return to the Man-Moths flight toward the moon: if there is
anything instinctual about his climb, it is his man drive toward a better world as much as his
moth drive toward more literal light. The dark description of his social conditions suggests that
the Man-Moth wishes to leave society through the hole in the sky because of his alienation, not
for his insect-halfs historic predisposition toward bright light. This whole facet of the poem is
reminiscent of the Post-Marxist philosopher Jacques Camatte, who penned an essay titled This
World We Must Leave. The title of that famous essay alone speaks to the Man-Moths journey
toward the moon, it is a mantra one could imagine repeated in the Man-Moths head as he
climbs, but Camattes kinship goes deeper. Camattes ideas, expanding on Marxs own
exploration of the concept, center on the subsumption of human beings to the community of
capital. Camatte argues that in advanced capitalism capital becomes society, that all is structured
around this abstraction and that the brokers of power themselves do not hold the reins. This is
certainly the state of poems subway system. When the concept of real subsumption is applied to
the Man-Moths experience in the subway, an experience so dictated by the inanimate, it is
simple to see the subway stanzas as representative of the total world the Man-Moth attempts to
leave.
The Man-Moths attempt to escape through the moon fails. One might say, of course it
fails. This is one of the divisions Bishop draws between the whole human and the hybrid ManMoth, a division far more significant than (for example) the way the Man-Moth sits in the

subway car. During the Man-Moths climb away from society, the speaker notes that Man,
standing below him, has no such illusions. Perhaps the Man-Moths moth-ness leads him to
believe in escapes the more fully subsumed Man does not. That moth-ness also informs the type
of escape he is drawn to, light hanging above. The Man-Moths other/moth-ness placed in
parallel social terms could be queerness, racial difference, or gender non-conformity. Bishop was
certainly most familiar with the first of those, but thematically the Man-Moths otherness could
be anything. It is most importantly otherness, expressed in terms relating to itself (a moth
chasing bright light.) Though one could argue for the beauty in the Man-Moths attempt to leave
through the sky, exploration of ones othered identity alone is here not enough to escape a
totalizing system. Thus the poem ends not with liberation but an encounter between the reader
and the Man-Moth which emphasizes our difference.
The final stanza suddenly introduces the reader into the narrative. We are told that if we
catch the Man-Moth we ought to hold up a flashlight to his eye. We do this in order to
capture his tear. Here, ones first impression might be, Bishops post-modern impulse drives her
to unnecessary cynicism. The Man-Moth is presented to us as other, a creature who we have
hunted. He is a romantic martyr, forced to give up his tear for our sins as an industrial society.
And it seems that we cannot understand him, that we are given another Elizabeth Bishop poem
which asserts that the barriers to understanding that which lies outside ourselves are too great.
Yet it could be argued that the strength of the poem is not in exoticism but in familiarity. In the
context of Western mass anomie, depression, and alienation we may find the Man-Moth more
brother than monster.
A function of shared alienation within modernity is certainly that there are barriers to
understanding, here represented by the Man-Moths moth-ness (other-ness), yet the shared nature

of that alienation betrays that there are universal qualities to this disconnect. The reader who has
felt the weight of modernity connects with the Man-Moth. This seems to suggest a contradiction
at the heart of the poem. To resolve this contradiction, one must interpret the Man-Moth as
giving the watchful reader his tear willingly. The reader is told that if you watch the ManMoth will give away his single tear and that it is cool as from underground springs and pure
enough to drink. Bishop describes the tear the way she describes knowledge in other work,
comparing its temperature to underground springs. When Bishop describes knowledge in At
The Fishhouses she emphasizes that we imagine it to spring from such solid sources. Here,
however, she lends the tear an unprecedented objectivity. In Bishops realistic poetry knowledge
is corrupted. In this surrealist poem, knowledge is pure. The Man-Moth gives those who pay
close attention his truth, a truth undeniably connected to reality. To pay attention to the ManMoth is exactly what we do as patient readers of the poem. It is to truly note his suffering, his
tear, and it is to find ourselves in it. It is not in the Man-Moths subjective particularity alone,
then, that we find hope. We will not, remaining severed from each other, escape through our
respective moons. However, examining the unique ways we experience being othered by society,
ironically, is presented by the poem as a key part of our path to finding common cause against
our alienation. We find hope in the potential for those who look to see shared difference, united
alienation, and a mutual desire for something better.

Elizabeth Bishop, The Man-Moth from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright 1979,
1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.