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Learn More. "On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book" is Victorian poet Charles Tennyson Turner's meditation on mortality and memory. Discovering a fly pressed in a book, the poem's speaker reflects that death is both inevitable and unpredictable, coming for human beings and flies alike. It's a shame, the speaker concludes, that so few people ...
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‘On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book’ by Charles Tennyson Turner is a straightforward poem that compares a fly’s death to human death. In the first lines of the poem, the speakertalks to a deceased fly that he’s found crushed in a book. He interprets its death as accidental, as though someone closed the book on it without meaning to. Despite t...
In ‘On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book,’ Turner primarily addresses the theme of the inevitability of death. He spends the first part of the poem admiring the fly, its untimely death, and what is left behind. Then, he transitions into a description of death as a feature of everyone’s life. The book is expanded and used as a metaphorfor death ...
‘On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book’ by Charles Tennyson Turner is a fourteen-line poem that follows a rhyme scheme of ABABCDDCEFEFGG, which can be interpreted as an alternative sonnet form. Turner plays with the rhyme schemes, blending elements of both Italian sonnets and English sonnets. Initially adopting the ABBA pattern reminiscent of It...
In ‘On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book’ Turner makes use of several literary devices. These include but are not limited to alliteration, caesura, and metaphor. The first of these, alliteration, is a common literary device that’s concerned with the use and reuse of the same consonant sound at the beginning of multiple words. For example, “thou...
Lines 1-4
In the first lines of ‘On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book,’ the speaker begins by addressing the fly. This is a technique known as an apostrophe. The fly cannot understand the speaker, and even if it could, it can’t respond (because it’s a fly but also because it’s dead). He tells the fly that “Some hand” has done “thee hurt.” He believes that whoever crushed the fly in the book didn’t mean to do so, but it happened nonetheless. Although this is a terrible and unimpressive death, the fl...
Lines 5-8
In the second stanza, the poet begins with the exclamation, “Oh!” He connects the fly’s monument, its tiny body in the book, to another kind of memory, those of life. He wishes that life’s memories were as beautiful, or “half as lovely,” as the vision of the fly in the book. Its wings are striking and connected with the speaker at that moment. He continues to speak about the fly’s wings, telling it that the wings appear to him as “Pure relics of a blameless life.” The fly lived as a pure, sin...
Lines 9-14
In the ninth line of ‘‘On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book,’ the speaker, now directing his words out more broadly to whoever is reading or listening, says that “peril is beside us day.” Death and danger are companions throughout life. Eventually, the same book that closed on the fly is going to “close upon us.” It’s clear that he’s interpreted the death of the fly as a broader metaphor for the death that’s going to come for everyone. It can take come just as we try to fly away into the...
Readers who enjoyed ‘On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book’ should also consider reading some similar pieces. For example: 1. ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ by Emily Dickinson 2. ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’by Dylan Thomas 3. ‘The Death Bed’ by Siegfried Sassoon. The latter describes the peaceful death of a soldier who suffered in th...
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The fly's pressed wings, in other words, are perfectly preserved on the page—and thus form the fly's own "fair monument," its beautiful tomb. Readers who, like the speaker, have found a fly pressed in a book, will be able to imagine this moment clearly. Flies' wings do often look fresh, lively, "gleam[ing]," and rather beautiful flat
The speaker of the poem finds a crushed fly in a book and reflects on the inevitability of mortality and the importance of leaving a legacy after death. ‘On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book’ breakdown. Lines 1–2. “Some hand, that never meant to do thee hurt, Has crushed thee here between these pages pent;”.
Feb 19, 2024 · The speaker addresses the fly in the opening words of “On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book.” This method is called an apostrophe. The fly is dead and unable to respond, so even if it could understand the speaker, it would be unable to do so. “Some hand” hath done “thee hurt,” he says the fly.
Mar 4, 2023 · The image of being trapped in a closing book and crushed to death is both funny and disturbing, reminding us that death is implacable and unavoidable. People, unlike flies, cannot just up and soar away. It is this last point which makes Turner’s poem more than just another ‘fear of death’ poem.
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Detailed analysis by Claire’s Notes of ‘On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in Book’ by Charles Tennyson TurnerCambridge iGCSE: Songs of Ourselves, Vol. 4Please ...
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- Claire's Notes
