We impose symbolic delusions: coyotes skulk, eagles rule. We can barely imagine a scavenger—a hyena, say, or a vulture—as hero. It is as if each animal is born into a rigid social caste. The title of Disney’s movie The Lion King is almost redundant; we know that a lion will be brave, strong, and authoritative. This is why the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz is funny, and this kind of thinking makes a philosophical cockroach funny. We even fantasize about exchanging forms with other creatures—yet another way that Don Marquis turned to a venerable tradition when he first spoke in the voice of Archy. The metamorphoses in Ovid, like those in Marquis, often involve a human being who turns into an animal but continues to think like a human. The freedom, the goad to imagination, in this theme has lured writers from Apuleius to Kafka.

Archy and Mehitabel belong to an ancient and noble family in this class of fictional characters: animals that writers have created in order to explore—and comment from within—their outsider view of human society. Readers of Aesop or Bidpai or La Fontaine immediately understand why Marquis reincarnated his socially conscious narrator as a cockroach rather than as an eagle or a lion. Because they frequent garbage cans, cockroaches must constitute the animal peasantry. Like Tom and Huck’s, Archy and Mehitabel’s adventures and opinions would have been completely different had they come from upper-class characters.

Marquis’s clever use of reincarnation as the bridge between species, however, permits him to employ animal stereotypes without being trapped inside them. Returned to embodiment as a cockroach, Archy now occupies the lowest rung of the natural and social ladder, but his consciousness is still human. Marquis needed this kind of viewpoint character. Like Mark Twain before him and John Steinbeck after him, he examined the American experience from outside the drawing-room window. Viewing life “from the under side”—reviled, persona non grata—Archy embodies a populist sermon against the myth that social status limits perception or relevance. He scurries around the feet of New Yorkers like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, and like Gulliver he alternately laughs and groans over the antics of the giants. Marooned in a new era and a new body, the former poet is a visitor to his own world.

THE BONDAGE OF RHYMING

before i became a cockroach
i was a free verse poet
one of the pioneers of the artless art

As long ago as 1667, John Milton prefaced Paradise Lost with a manifesto about the time-honored virtues of unrhymed verse. Invoking Homer and Virgil on his own behalf, the contentious Puritan argued that “true musical delight” in poetry rejects “the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.” Of course, Milton was talking about book-length heroic verse, not squibs hammered out by arthropods, but the admonition still applies. Poetry does not demand rhyme.

Milton employed blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, which he and Shakespeare established as the voice of serious poetic utterance in English poetry. (“Of Man’s First Disobedience and the Fruit / of that Forbidden Tree. . . .”) In its regular meter, however, even blank verse is not totally “free.” Our insect anarchist requires absolute liberty for his expression. In his first appearance Archy declares that he is a “vers libre bard”; later he describes himself as in the epigraph above. Anglophone poets and critics use the French vers libre and the English free verse interchangeably. Rejecting predictable meter or even patterns of line length, free verse depends upon language’s natural rhythms, primarily—in a Germanic language such as English, at least—through the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. Proponents of free verse argue that poetry’s rhythms are more natural, its nuances more precise, when poets are liberated from the need to carve lines into matching structures that may distort image and meaning. Leaves of Grass is probably the most familiar example of free verse prior to the twentieth century’s flowering. Walt Whitman, however, was not the first to employ this method in English; you can see it used to brilliant effect in the King James translation of the Psalms and the Song of Solomon.

Marquis’s use of the phrase “artless art” reminds us that he created Archy to parody the vogue for free verse. Good free verse isn’t artless—although, like abstract painting, it looks at first glance as if anyone can do it.