The Moths
The Moths - meaning Summary
Attention as a Form of Solace
The poem follows a speaker whose restless attention to the natural world helps her face emotional pain. Watching white moths and moccasin flowers gradually shifts her from anxious thoughts about saving the world toward humility and absorbed presence. The moths' brief brightness and nighttime shelter suggest that noticing small lives can offer solace without solving suffering.
Read Complete AnalysesThere’s a kind of white moth, I don’t know what kind, that glimmers by mid-May in the forest, just as the pink mocassin flowers are rising. If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more. And anyway I was so full of energy. I was always running around, looking at this and that. If I stopped the pain was unbearable. If I stopped and thought, maybe the world can’t be saved, the pain was unbearable. Finally, I noticed enough. All around me in the forest the white moths floated. How long do they live, fluttering in and out of the shadows? You aren’t much, I said one day to my reflection in a green pond, and grinned. The wings of the moths catch the sunlight and burn so brightly. At night, sometimes, they slip between the pink lobes of the moccasin flowers and lie there until dawn, motionless in those dark halls of honey.
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