I'm only here to clip your wings—

I've decided that Breaking Benjamin has this weird thing for insects. "Lady bug" and "Firefly" are the particular tracks I adore and currently am thinking of. Then again, maybe it's ME that has a weird thing for insects, if I'm the one that made them my favorites... ...WHATEVER. IRRELEVANT.

Anyway, thinking about this today caused me to invoke some nineteenth-century American poetry. Yeah. That's the kind of stuff that goes on in my head. The poem "To a Mosquito," by Bryant, begins with an unusual "fair insect!" Unusual, that is, for the normal person; Bryant does this kinda crap all the time.

Even Emerson, certainly a more frank and gloomy poem, in his poem "The Humble-Bee," calls the creature "Wiser far than human seer / Yellow-breeched philosopher!" He admires how "ridiculous" the torturous wants and woes of life that grief humans are made as the bee slumbers.



The gnats in various pieces by Dickinson are often used in comparison to herself. "It would have starved a Gnat—" she says, "To live so small as I." However, the poor girl is always in a worse state: "Nor like the Gnat—had I— / The privilege to fly," she laments.

These, praising or envying the life of the bugs, sat in stark contrast to the spiteful verses Breaking Benjamin presents. "Lady bug -- you're pathetic and I've said it more than once," is a sentiment unseen in the previous poems. This song is also the source of this blog's title: "What did you say to me? I'm only here to clip your wings." You can't help but be a bit taken aback at the intimacy of the lyric.
"You my friend -- you're a lot like them," Burnley sings during the intro to Firefly, "But I caught your lie." We don't know what the hell these bugs did to Ben, but he certainly is not fond of them.

I stared at a tiny bug on my windowsill this morning, musing about the multitude of personifications artists apply to these members of the arthropoda phylum and their interpretations of their relationship to them. Perhaps to consider a firefly a former friend whose ways are "just like mine," with implicit malice or corruption identified in both the homonid and lampyrid, justifies a more critical and personal approach. I also thought about the envy of the simplicity depicted of the lives of insecta class in the poems from the 1800s and considered the displacement between the creature and the poet perhaps the very thing that allows them to view the other in such reverent light.

Then I remembered that I hate bugs and squished it with a tissue.

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