The Fly by Miroslav Holub

First published: 1961, as “Moucha,” in Slabikář; English translation collected in Selected Poems, 1967

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“The Fly” is a short poem in free verse, in thirty-three lines, divided into eight stanzas. The title reflects Miroslav Holub’s practice, as a distinguished scientist, of frequently drawing on biology, with its life-forms and life processes, for his imagery. The fly serves as an observer of the Battle of Crécy, the fly’s demeanor and behavior being apposed to the human drama being enacted on the battlefield. Behind the fly is a second observer, the poet. The poem is a meditation on a historic event. The poem is also divided into what Holub calls units of attention, some of them long to achieve effects of suspense, others short for emphases, often one-word or one-image lines.

In the first line, the fly sits at a distance on the trunk of a willow tree. Then Holub uses one of his one-word lines, the word “watching,” to focus on the demeanor of the fly. It is watching the historic Battle of Crécy. Then, with four one-image lines, Holub quickly develops the drama on the battlefield: the battle cries, the surprise, the moans of the wounded, and, finally, the panic as the soldiers fall over each other in their frantic flight.

Holub now skips to the last of the fourteen futile charges by the French cavalry, concentrating the tragedy in two powerful images: a disemboweled horse and the blue tongue of a duke. He interpolates an image of the fly mating with a brown-eyed male fly from the neighboring village of Vadincourt (Wadicourt) during the charge and then descending to sit upon the disemboweled horse and rubbing her legs together, meditating. Here Holub again uses a one-word line, “meditating,” for emphasis. The fly is meditating on the immortality, not of itself, but of all flies. Here Holub is paraphrasing an old German folk saying, “Er grübbelt über die Unsterblichkeit der Maikäfer” (He meditates upon the immortality of the junebug), a saying well-known to Czechs. The subject is ironically juxtaposed with the death scene, the immortality of a lower life form against the deaths of human beings.

Then the poem uses a slow, ten-line, four-stanza sentence that begins with three sobering images: a silence settling upon the battlefield and the faint odor of decay and bodies—followed by a pause between stanzas—and then the picture of a few arms and legs still twitching jerkily under living trees, and, finally, these images climaxing with the fly, against the backdrop of death, as it lays its eggs on the dead eye of the Royal Armorer.

In the final short stanza, the fly quickly meets her own death, devoured by a swift from the neighboring village of Estrées, that in another one-word line, is itself “fleeing”—fleeing, one learns in the ominous last line, from the fires of Estrées.

Forms and Devices

The poetic technique of Holub has had two major influences: his involvement with the Květen movement, the generation of young poets that emerged in Czechoslovakia after the death of Joseph Stalin, and his profession as a scientist.

The Květen advocated a return to reality, even to the dark side of situations. The poet, Holub said, should turn to “facts” and should use words at the level of the common man. For this reason, Holub’s poems are relatively easy to translate. Holub’s interest in facts frequently led him to probe the meanings in historical events, as in “Fall of Troy,” “Discobolus,” “Achilles and the Tortoise,” and “The Fly.”

As a research scientist, he carried over into his poetry what A. Alvarez described in his introduction to Selected Poems (1967) as a “probing below the surface of received, everyday experience to reveal new meaning…as though his poems and his researcher’s microscope worked in the same way,” isolating details for analysis and reflection. This technique is similar to that of the abstract painter when he reduces a situation to its bare elements, or like that of Holub’s one-time collaborator and photographer, Jan Pařík, who specialized in subjects found in hospital wards, except that Holub proceeds behind the scenes to meditate on their meanings.

In “The Fly,” Holub probes beneath the surface of facts about the Battle of Crécy: the rout of the Genoese, the massacre of the mounted knights, the surprise to the French army by the introduction of a new weapon and a new military strategy, and the massive shower of arrows from longbows that pierced the previously impenetrable medieval armor. The significant details are condensed into a few simple images: the initial enthusiasm, with “shouts”; the shock, with “gasps”; the pain, with “groans”; the panic, with “the tramping and the tumbling.” The slaughter of the mounted knights is conveyed by two images: the “disembowelled horse” and the “blue tongue” of the duke. The aftermath is suggested by “silence,” “the whisper of decay” over bodies, and “a few arms and legs” that “twitched jerkily.”

Holub’s images are sometimes grotesque, with hints of surrealism. Some of these images derive from his interest as a biologist in lower life-forms and life processes, often in startling juxtapositions. In “Suffering,” microorganisms “graze in the greenish-blue pool of the chromatogram,” while the “ugly animal” watches them through a microscope. In “The Fly,” the fly mates during the charge of the French cavalry, alights upon a disemboweled horse, and lays her eggs on a dead eye.

After isolating the details of a situation, Holub proceeds to reassemble them into meaningful patterns. In “The Fly,” these patterns are the juxtapositions, the ironic reversal of fortunes from unsuspecting innocence and arrogant pride to death and destruction, for both the French army and the fly, and the interpolated meditation on immortality and the laying of eggs within the context of death.