Today’s Poem: archy confesses

A cockroach announces his place among the greats

George Herriman’s drawing for Don Marquis’s archy & mehitabel, 1927

Last year, when Sally Thomas and I were working on a column for the New York Sun, I had occasion to write about one of the newspaper’s old columnists, Don Marquis (1878–1937). Author of the “Sun Dial” column, before moving to the Tribune, Marquis invented several characters to use in his columns — most famously, Archy and Mehitabel, which he came up with in 1916.

It was as peculiar and wonderful a conceit as an American newspaper writer has ever attempted, since Archy is a poetry-writing cockroach, while his friend Mehitabel is an alley cat who claims she was Cleopatra in a previous life. On Wednesdays here in Poems Ancient and Modern, we try to feature light or comic verse, and for today I decided to revisit the New York Sun’s great columnist, rivaled only by Franklin P. Adams as a newspaper poet in the first half of the twentieth century, transcending what we have called the amateur poets.

The problem Archy faced was that he could write only by throwing himself at the keys of Marquis’s typewriter at night, when the office was empty. That made it impossible for the poor cockroach to use capitalization (until, in a later poem called “CAPITALS AT LAST,” Archy discovered the shift-lock key). The limited punctuation in the notes and poems supposedly came from the exhaustion of throwing himself at the keys, as Archy tried to limit his battering.

And the voice . . . ah, yes, the sentimental tough-guy voice the cockroach used in his notes and poetry. It would be tempting to trace the typing tricks to the eccentric typography of E.E. Cummings’s poetry, but Cummings’s first book, Tulips and Chimneys, didn’t appear until 1923, long after the 1916 start for Archy in the Sun. Marquis first collected the poems in book form in the 1927 archy and mehitabel, illustrated by George Herriman (creator of the Krazy Kat comic strip). Two later volumes would follow — archys life of mehitabel (1933) and archy does his part (1935) — after Marquis switched over to the Tribune.

A woodcut portrait of Don Marquis, by Bertrand Zadig, 1926 (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem first appeared in Marquis’s “Sun Dial” column and was reprinted in his first book of archy’s writing. The line breaks hide a little the fact that the poem is not free verse but rhymed tetrameter couplets in a loose dactylic trot. (Try it like this: The fish wife curse and the laugh of the horse: / Shakespeare and I are frequently coarse.) The poetic cockroach puts himself in the company of the great, as a way of justifying his common phrasings and wry comments of the social scene — in this case his interest in the lowbrow comedy of the working classes.

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archy confesses

by Don Marquis

coarse
jocosity
catches the crowd
shakespeare
and i
are often
low browed

the fish wife
curse
and the laugh
of the horse
shakespeare
and i
are frequently
coarse

aesthetic
excuses
in bill s behalf
are adduced
to refine
big bill s
coarse laugh

but bill
he would chuckle
to hear such guff
he pulled
rough stuff
and he liked
rough stuff

hoping you
are the same

          archy

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