18 pages • 36 minutes read
Karl ShapiroThe Fly
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Fly
The titular fly carries a lot of symbolic weight. In Western cultures, flies are primarily associated with death and are often interpreted as warnings of impending danger. In the Hebrew Bible, flies operate as signals for human foolishness and warnings of God’s wrath. In Exodus, for example, the fourth plague brought upon Egypt consists of flies, and the seventh plague consists of locusts. The fly, in this regard, can be understood as one step that aided the release of the Jewish people under Egyptian rule.
Shapiro, a Jewish poet, draws on these historical associations—particularly in the context of World War II and rampant antisemitism—to create similar warnings. Shapiro's fly is best understood as an indistinct other whose practices appear disgusting to the speaker but seek a similar end. The speaker’s “hate” (Line 33) toward another creature that means him no real harm mirrors the racism and antisemitism rampant in 1940s Europe. Shapiro stops short of associating the fly with any particular group; instead, it is an indistinct target for the speaker’s rage. The fly thus acts as a foil, or a character that contrasts with the speaker to reveal his contradictory sympathy and spite.
Cannibalism
The “three cannibals” (Line 48) at the end of the poem are three other flies. When the speaker finally succeeds in killing the poem’s titular fly, these other flies eat the victim. This cannibalism also represents the poem’s focus on life, death, and the state of nature (See: Themes), since these flies participate in the same cycle of living consuming the dead in order to continue life. Additionally, the cannibals’ place at the end of the poem symbolizes the cyclical character of life, consumption, and rebirth: The poem opens with the one fly, who through the course of the poem lives, reproduces, dies, and is consumed by three other flies. This movement from one to three represents the generative nature of reproduction and suggests that the speaker’s trouble has also multiplied.
Finally, the idea of the flies’ cannibalism furnishes the poem’s ironic tone and its implicit focus on war, as so much of the poem highlights not insect but human violence. Additionally, the speaker earlier describes himself as “strid[ing]” like “Gargantua […] among / The [flies’] corpses strewn like raisins in the dust.” Gargantua is a cannibalistic medieval figure who devours pilgrims. For the speaker to label the flies as “cannibals” is only to further liken himself to the insects (whom he now also compares to raisins, suitable nutriment for humans). Yet again, a comment on the insects is a comment on humanity, itself a beast capable of gratuitous wartime violence against his own and other species. Though it doesn’t appear literally or explicitly in the poem, the Nazi’s war may be among the greatest cannibalisms the poet addresses.
The Polyhedral Eye
The fly’s “polyhedral eye” (Line 2) is one of the poem’s most understated symbols. The geometric structure of a fly’s eye is such that it is able to see multiple perspectives at once. The speaker’s attention to the fly’s eye, therefore, foreshadows his taking the fly’s perspective later in the work. It also functions as a possible instruction to the reader to look at the poem from multiple perspectives.
The construction of human eyes, by contrast, physically limits them to a single point of view. The physical symbolizes the psychological: Despite the speaker’s sympathy and ability to take the fly’s perspective, the speaker’s adherence to his own perspective ends with the fly’s death. The fly’s eye, then, symbolizes plurality and perspective, despite the creature’s size.
