The Man-Moth by Elizabeth Bishop

The Man-Moth
Elizabeth Bishop

          Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.”

Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.

                    But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

                    Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

                    Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.

                    Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

                    If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

SELECTED BY TALIN TAHAJIAN

Elizabeth Bishop is not exactly known as a surrealist poet, but this poem, first published in 1936, introduced me to the possibility of surrealism in poetry. I remember finding it as a teenager and being amazed by her portraiture of this hybrid creature, so like the poet but so not the poet, and in fact in constant attempt to elude the trappings of poetry, literally—i.e., in constant attempt to avoid being trapped inside the poem. But it happens nonetheless; this poem itself becomes the bright subway tunnel inside of which the man-moth darts around like an abstraction. There is no “I” here; the “I” is formulated only by the speaker’s observations of this creature, whose habits and characteristics become her habits and characteristics by dint of interpretation (we project our own tendencies onto others). But it’s not just interpretation: at the end, it’s revealed that the man-moth has in fact given something over to the poet. The man-moth, we’re told, is ensouled: the bee that loses its stinger is consigned to death, and the man that gives up his soul is likewise fated. The man-moth has a similar “possession”: a single tear, which he’ll give up only if he deems the quality of the attention of his observer to be sufficient; this is the only metric he’ll use to decide whether she’s worthy of its inheritance. That the poet knows of the possibility of this ritual implies that she herself has experienced it, just as her claim that the tear is “cool enough to drink” implies that she has attempted as much, or at least been tempted to do so. The speaker has foregone her “I” because she’s gone through the eucharistic process of self-annihilation in the face of this mystical figure—half-man, half-creature of light—that has given up his tear for her, and died for her, and been absorbed into her skin in the process of her consumption of his fatal artifact, and the result is this poem.

ABOUT TALIN TAHAJIAN

Talin Tahajian is from Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, The Rumpus, Copper Nickel, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Magazine, TriQuarterly, Pleiades, West Branch, The Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Drift, Mizna, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She’s a Ph.D. candidate in English at Yale and an assistant editor of The Yale Review.