“the lesson of the moth” is a persona poem told from the perspective of Archy—a cockroach who, in a previous life, was a free-verse poet. True to Archy’s past-life experience, “the lesson of the moth” is written in free verse, a form of poetry first popularized by Walt Whitman and that became a critical component of the modernist movement. Free verse, in general, follows no strict formal rules—but that does not mean it is completely unstructured. Rather, free verse poems use idiosyncratic structures that enhance particular aspects of the poem. Stanza breaks in “the lesson of the moth,” for example, are dictated by a change in speaker rather than a number of lines. Because of this removal of traditional formal structures, free verse is generally seen as a truer expression of the author’s poetic intention.

The “truth” of Marquis’s poetic intention may be undermined by Archy as a narrative device. Many of the formal decisions that led to “the lesson of the moth” were made in order to fit Archy’s narrative frame, and so these formal elements are not to be understood as “free” in the same way.

The poem’s particularities, however, still inform its proper reading.