When it comes to excitement and enjoyment “i would rather have half the happiness and twice the longevity”. Archy the narrator of the poem is a character of the poet Don Marquis. Archy is a cockroach who types poems at night on the typewriter in Marquis’s house and leaves poems for him. Though this is fictional, Marquis uses Archy’s eyes to tell the story. In this poem Archy talks to a moth that is trying to get into a light bulb. He has a conversation with the moth about craving beauty and beauty instead of being bored all the time. Having beauty only for moments but going through the same routine for a longer duration of time. The moth flies off and kills itself on a cigar. Archy said that he would rather live with less happiness in exchange for a larger life span, but wishes he had a desire for something like the moth had. In The Lesson of the Month, Archy learns that it is better to stay alive than to have beauty and excitement for a monument.
The tone of The Lesson of the Moth a constant mix of being serious and bright
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The Lesson of the Moth though has many important and impactful repetitions in words. For example, it has a form of beauty five times and a form of the word happy or exciting twice. It also emphasizes the words kill, bored, and things related to death eight or nine times. Don Marquis made it this way to show the reader the different types of words like excitement and bored to show the contrast in the poem. It makes the reader feel death and light at the same time. This relates back to the principle because it takes the background out of the story and help highlight that beauty and excitement only last a monement but living a normal boring life lasts a lifetime. It also demonstrates that a normal longer life that is better because of all the death that happens after the beauty and