Man-Moth Essay Questions

How is perseverance a main theme of this poem?

The Man-Moth makes repeated attempts to fly into the sky and reach the moon, which he believes to be a hole in the night sky. Each night, he attempts to scale buildings to reach the night sky. And each night, he fails to reach his goal and falls back to the ground, frightened but unhurt. Though the Man-Moth will never reach the moon, he perseveres, never faltering in his aims. Bishop depicts this perseverance as pitiable but, in a sense, admirable—not because the Man-Moth will eventually succeed but rather because, in his uncanny innocence, he has not been defeated by his bleak environment.

How does Elizabeth Bishop depict the city in this poem?

In "The Man-Moth," the city is an unnatural, isolating place. The poem's title character is the only denizen of his city to look up at the moon: the others are uninterested, evidently cut off from the natural world. Meanwhile, the Man-Moth spends most of his time riding the city's subways. There, he has trouble boarding before the doors close, and faces backwards as the train moves, as if his own body has fallen out of step with the technologically driven urban landscape. As he rides the train, he is forced to look away from the third rail, fearing that he is "susceptible" to it: this suggests that the city is a place of dangerous or even addictive temptations, but few real pleasures and no satisfying companionship.