Summary
After his failed attempt to reach the moon, the Man-Moth goes back to his underground home. There, he flutters around, and tries to get on subway train cars where the doors close too quickly for him. He sits facing in the wrong direction. The trains move so quickly, without any signals to tell the Man-Moth how fast they are going or in which direction, that the Man-Moth has no idea how fast he's moving backward. Each night, as the Man-Moth rides the train through the underground passages, he has recurring dreams. These repeat in his mind just as the tracks repeat under the train. He's afraid to look out of the windows and see the dangerous third rail of the train tracks. The Man-Moth feels that he's especially vulnerable to this danger, so he keeps his hands inside the protected space of his pockets.
The speaker then directly addresses a "you"—the reader, or another unnamed listener. The speaker tells the addressee that, if they ever manage to catch the Man-Moth, they should shine a light in his eye. His eye is made up of just the pupil, seeming to contain the night. As he looks back, the speaker explains, the Man-Moth will close his eye, and a single tear will emerge from it. He might try to wipe it away and disguise it. However, if you look at him closely, he'll pass it to you. The tear will be cold like an underground spring, and clean enough for you to drink.
Analysis
While the Man-Moth himself is a fantastical, invented being, the setting he inhabits is in a purely factual sense not at all unusual. Bishop describes him living in a city with tall buildings and a shining moon, among ordinary humans, and riding an underground train—none of which is, on its own, strange or unusual. Yet Bishop's descriptive mode renders this environment ominous. She defamiliarizes the ordinary urban landscape partially by describing the typical in such painstaking detail that it begins to seem atypical. She does this in the poem's first half, with details like "The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat." But the technique of depicting the normal as abnormal, even surreal, reaches its peak in the latter half of this poem. For instance, when describing the movements of the underground metro, Bishop describes the speed and smoothness of the train in such painstaking detail that it begins to seem unnatural and entirely new.
By portraying this urban landscape as bizarre and confusing, Bishop helps readers gain a sense of the Man-Moth's own feelings of alienation from his surroundings—for instance, the way that he experiences the train as dangerous, overwhelming, and bewildering. More broadly, she suggests that contemporary urban life as a whole is unnatural, causing people to feel alienated from one another and from their surroundings. The image of the train picking up speed, "without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort," offers an example: it describes the very infrastructure of modern city life as devoid of intuitive, embodied experiences that allow people to orient themselves and connect to others. Meanwhile, the Man-Moth fears the third rail, avoiding even glancing at it and fearing that he is especially susceptible to it. Here, the modern city has few real pleasures, but it does offer dangerous, destructive temptations that must be kept at bay. He rides the train facing backward, as if so cut off from his environment that he has no interest in or sense of something as basic as the direction in which he moves.
Throughout this work, the Man-Moth doesn't only feel afraid of and alienated from his surroundings. He also quite literally experiences no interactions at all. Though "Man" appears in the poem, it is only as part of the work's backdrop—Man and the Man-Moth never cross paths. Otherwise, his city is curiously devoid of other beings. At the end of the poem, Bishop reverses this by evoking an intimate moment. In fact, she does so doubly by pivoting to directly address the reader. The use of the second person creates a sense of vulnerability and closeness, with communication playing out between speaker and addressee as well as between the addressee and the Man-Moth. During this sudden, climactic moment of face-to-face intimacy, the Man-Moth finally succeeds at connecting with the outside world (in contrast to the poem's early stanzas, in which his attempts to reach and explore the moon are thwarted). The Man-Moth is described as passing one of his tears to the "you," in a sudden display of candid openness. Moreover, this tear is compared to an "underground spring," creating a contrast with the underground trains described elsewhere in the poem. While these trains are cramped and unnatural, these underground springs are both natural and unrestricted, with connotations of change, fluidity, and freedom. For the first time, in a small and bittersweet way, the Man-Moth manages to interact meaningfully with the outside world.
