In his essay "What Is Not Poetry?" Karl Shapiro defines his conception of the poet:

The poet does not see the world differently, and everything in it. He does not deliberately go into training to sharpen his senses; he is a poet because his senses are naturally open and vitally sensitive. But what the poet sees with his always new vision is not what is "imaginary"; he sees what others have forgotten how to see. The poet is always stripping away the veils and showing us his reality. (274)

"The Fly" opens with a hissed curse, an honest portrayal of the riled annoyance we've all felt when being pestered by this formidably persistent insect: "O hideous little bat, the size of snot." Having turned his attention to the fly, though, the poet quickly sees more than a mere interruption in his afternoon; he also notices the multiple flat surfaces of the fly's "polyhedral" eye and the "shabby" appearance of its hairy body. Having zoomed down to this minuscule perspective, the poet begins to see things from a less anthropocentric viewpoint and imagines what it is to be a fly. This interest in a view of the world from another angle continues; just as the fiber-optic lens turns arteries into tunnels and termite warrens into teeming cities, so the poet's sharper vision turns a man's nose into a "promontory" and scoops of food into "smoking mountains." And just as the fly walks in jerky, stuttering spurts, so moves the description of his travels afoot, starting and stopping, syllable by sputtering syllable: "To populate the stinking cat you walk / The promontory of the dead man's nose, / Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan Phyfe...." No longer is the fly "[h]ideous"; instead, the poet sees the insect as both adventurous and playful in his efforts to perpetuate his species, taking his "wife" to bed "in mid-air," in a "comic mood."

A bit of disgust returns in the second stanza, with a note of the fly's "filth of hair," but the poet's continued interest leads him to a mood of admiration for the insect's efforts. The fly becomes, for example, an artist: here an abstract expressionist dotting the canvas of an empty wall, there a meticulous artisan, "inlay[ing] maggots like a jewel." By the third stanza, disgust has faded further, nudged aside by an increasing admiration for the persistence of the David-like fly as it battles the Goliath flails of giant hands and horsetail hurricanes.

The fly's "kiss" of the poet's hand in the third stanza suggests a transfer, a shift in the subject matter of the poem. Even though the focus throughout the second half of the poem would seem to remain on the fly and its struggles, the focus has actually moved to consideration of people and what makes us do what we do to flies. The fly's kiss may transfer a "disease," but the poet has become aware that we are already infected; it is mankind that subjects the fly to the virulence of violence.

The poet's vision has led him from consideration of the fly to consideration of the human race. "My peace is your disaster," the poet soberly says to the fly, the brevity of his statement adding to its weight. Although flies may irritate and disgust humans, our race alone is capable of the organized, premeditated horrors of war, of "kill[ing] to teach," of having to destroy before we can feel at peace. Children carry out their persecution with handcupped glee in the poem, and wives with chemical warfare, but it is the poet, as a man, who "must swat" the fly with his "hate." Whereas the earlier focus had led to a sense of admiration for the fly, in this fourth stanza it leads to a horror over the passionate violence with which man "swats," "slaps," "mangles," and "beats" his pitiful opponent. Man has replaced fly as the object of disgust, a transfer cemented by the final stanza of the poem.

In solidifying his new awareness of something unsavory within himself, the poet adds a culinary note to his role reversal. In the first stanza, the fly has more interest in a dead man's body than merely scaling the "promontory" of his nose. Perpetuation of his species is his object, and part of that process is finding nourishment in the dead man's flesh; our "disaster" is the fly's "peace." By poem's end, however, after his murderous assault on the fly, the poet "strides" like "Gargantua . . . among /The corpses strewn like raisins in the dust." The image of raisin-like flies suggests the thought of them as food for the poet, a suggestion strengthened by his chosen persona as the gigantic, medieval pilgrim-eater. The poet then feels "fingers of disgust" catch at his throat as he imagines a crispy snack of dusty flies. By poem's end, when a fly "Buzzes its frightful F / And dies between three cannibals," the poet has become a member of this macabre triangle, alert to his own frightening, savage impulses.

Awareness of the poem's publication date ( 1942) and of Shapiro's position then as a Jewish American poet-soldier, makes it tempting to search for more specifically symbolic content. Surely the Gargantuan cannibal stands for the evil Nazi war machine, the "fens of sticky paper and quicksand" for scenes of soldierly struggle, and so on. But when we are aware of Shapiro's poetic tenets, his practice in other poems, his attacks on the symbol mongering of the modernists, and his interest in the revelations of a visceral poetic vision, search for other historical symbolism ignores this poem's greater achievement. Rather than deliberately portraying the tendencies in certain men that led to the Second World War, Shapiro enacts the tendencies that lead a poet, through progressive stages, to a humbling awareness of the beast within all of us, a presence that most of us have forgotten how to see.
 
 

Shapiro, Karl. "What Is Not Poetry?" In Defense of Ignorance. New York: Random House, 1960. 263-285.

"The Fly." Person, Place and Thing. New York: Cornwall, 1942. 56-57.