The Death of the Moth

“Nevertheless, the present specimen, with his narrow hay-colored wings, fringed with a tassel of the same color, seemed to be content with life.”

The narrator’s connection with the moth grows as she notices its “contentment” with life. She assigns a gender to the creature, anthropomorphizing him. The reader is aware that the moth will die from the essay’s title. This is an example of dramatic irony as the reader has access to information that the narrator lacks.

“The rooks too were keeping one of their annual festivities; soaring round the tree tops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air; which, after a few moments sank slowly down upon the trees until every twig seemed to have a knot at the end of it. Then, suddenly, the net would be thrown into the air again in a wider circle this time, with the utmost clamor and vociferation, as though to be thrown into the air and settle slowly down upon the tree tops were a tremendously exciting experience.”

The narrator frames the rooks’ excitement as something instinctual. The simile of the rooks as a net explores this idea, using imagery to show that the individual rooks are part of a singular, vast fabric, making up one entity. This sets some groundwork for later discussion of nature as a whole.

“The same energy which inspired the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it seemed, the lean bare-backed downs, sent the moth fluttering from side to side of his square of the windowpane. One could not help watching him.”

The narrator argues that all living beings, and even non-sentient nature such as the downs, are connected by the same vital force. The narrator’s personality and priorities are further clarified: Amid the morning bustle, she is transfixed by the inconspicuous moth’s movements on the windowpane. The moth is closest to her physically, and its stage, the window, frames the beautiful scene. Despite its size, the moth is connected to the same vital force that energizes the bigger picture.

“The possibilities of pleasure that morning seemed so enormous and so various that to have only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the full, pathetic.”

The narrator’s sympathy overrides her initial scientific interest in the moth. Her sympathy increases the more she comprehends the limitations of his existence. The moth’s tiny world appears so unfortunate and pitiful compared to the big picture of the outside. 

“Watching him, it seemed as if a fiber, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world has been thrust into his frail and diminutive body. As often as he crossed the pane, I could fancy that a thread of vital light became visible. He was little or nothing but life.”

The essay takes a turn when the narrator explores paradoxical emotions inspired by the moth. The paradox in question is that the quality that makes the moth so pitiable, his liveliness despite his capacity to do much of anything, also makes it admirable. His ceaseless flight across the windowpane’s four corners makes him heroic in a sense. The narrator idealizes the moth’s vigorous embrace of his irrelevant existence.

“It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.”

Using simile, the narrator compares the moth to a bead of life, emphasizing its purity. The moth’s instincts are evident in its behavior, its desire to fly for no reason other than enjoyment—revealing something grand about nature itself. Its purposeless flight is magnified into a dance of life, a genuine form of celebration. Woolf draws attention to the seemingly unimportant and overlooked to reveal an important truth about human existence.

“One is apt to forget all about life, seeing it humped and bossed and garnished and cumbered so that it has to move with the greatest circumspection and dignity. Again, the thought of all that life might have been had he been born in any other shape caused one to view his simple activities with a kind of pity.”

The narrator argues that one is able to see life more directly by observing the moth because it isn’t burdened with the decorum of more complex beings, such as humans. She implies that the advancement of civilization conceals life in its barest form. Still, Woolf continues to pity the moth, imagining all that it could have been had he been born anything other than an insignificant insect.

“Then, looking up, my eye was caught by him. He was trying to resume his dancing, but seemed either so stiff or so awkward that he could only flutter to the bottom of the windowpane; and when he tried to fly across it, he failed.”

The moth’s diminished capacity to repeat his earlier feat foreshadows his death. Both the moth and the narrator do not know what the reader knows from the piece’s title. Again, the use of dramatic irony heightens the tension.

“But, as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again.”

This moment is the turning point of the piece. The narrator’s attention leaves the moth for a short while, only to return as she notices that he is dying. The moth’s death is not a sudden, abrupt one, but a slow draining of the life force he had prior. The narrator wishes to help him, but realizes that she can do nothing to prevent his death. The narrator cannot interfere with the natural process. 

“I looked as if for the enemy against which he struggled. I looked out of doors. What had happened there? Presumably it was midday, and work in the fields had stopped. Stillness and quiet had replaced the previous animation. The birds had taken themselves off to feed in the brooks. The horses stood still. Yes the power was there all the same, massed outside, indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular.”

The narrator’s attention returns to the scene outside her window, where the earlier lively atmosphere is no longer present. The world is still. Woolf parallels the moth’s draining life with the silence of the natural world surrounding them. The morning’s energy and the moth’s hyperactivity were linked, just as the quiet afternoon and the moth’s struggle are. The thread between all living things exists at both extremes. 

“One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew had any chance against death.”

The narrator is just as humbled before death’s power as the moth. However, she admires his attempt to fight fate. But through the use of juxtaposition, Woolf emphasizes the extreme futility of his efforts by comparing his tiny legs’ movements to death’s massive power to destroy cities and defeat massive quantities of humans.

“One’s sympathies, of course, were all on the side of life. Also, when there was nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such magnitude, to retain what no one else valued or desired to keep, moved on strangely. Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead.”

The narrator’s sympathy for the moth deepens as she sees him struggle for his life. His will to fight for such a pitiful, trifling existence gives her hope, and she wishes that he’ll somehow emerge victorious against the titanic power of death. 

“Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.”

Throughout the essay, the narrator explores life and death via a moth. The moth’s limited life was made odd in order to shed light on the nature of life itself. Though his death was inevitable, it too appears just as arbitrary, just as odd and unsuspected, as his life.