Grant Allen
Only an Insect
I
ON the crimson cloth
Of my study desk
A lustrous moth
Poised statuesque.
Of a waxen mould
Were its light limbs shaped,
And in scales of gold
Its body was draped:
While its luminous wings
Were netted and veined
With silvery strings,
Or golden grained,
Through whose filmy maze
In tremulous flight
Danced quivering rays
Of the gladsome light.
II
On the desk hard by
A taper burned,
Towards which the eye
Of the insect turned.
In its vague little mind
A faint desire
Rose, undefined,
For the beautiful fire.
Lightly it spread
Each silken van;
Then away it sped
For a moment’s span.
And a strange delight
Lured on its course
With resistless might
Towards the central source:
And it followed the spell
Through an eddying maze,
Till it fluttered and fell
In the deadly blaze.
III
Dazzled and stunned
By the scalding pain,
One moment it swooned,
Then rose again;
And again the fire
Drew it on with its charms
To a living pyre
In its awful arms;
And now it lies
On the table here
Before my eyes
Shrivelled and sere.
IV
As I sit and muse
On its fiery fate,
What themes abstruse
Might I meditate!
For the pangs that thrilled
Through that martyred frame
As its veins were filled
With the scorching flame,
A riddle enclose
That, living or dead,
In rhyme or in prose,
No seer has read.
“But a moth,” you cry,
“Is a thing so small!”
Ah, yes; but why
Should it suffer at all?
Why should a sob
For the vaguest smart
One moment throb
Through the tiniest heart?
Why in the whole
Wide universe
Should a single soul
Feel that primal curse?
Not all the throes
Of mightiest mind,
Nor the heaviest woes
Of human kind,
Are of deeper weight
In the riddle of things
Than that insect’s fate
With the mangled wings.
V
But if only I
In my simple song
Could tell you the Why
Of that one little wrong,
I could tell you more
Than the deepest page
Of saintliest lore
Or of wisest sage.
For never as yet
In its wordy strife
Could Philosophy get
At the import of life;
And Theology’s saws
Have still to explain
The inscrutable cause
For the being of pain.
So I somehow fear
That in spite of both,
We are baffled here
By this one singed moth.