Background info: The narrator is a poet reincarnated in a cockroach’s body. He types by jumping on the keys of a typewriter, hence the lack of caps. Knowing that helps :)

I don’t usually care overmuch for free verse; Don Marquis is a rare but welcome exception. His poems are delightful, refreshing and filled with the kind of insight one usually associates with humorists like Twain. The one above is my favourite; while not as witty as some of the others, it makes me shiver, which is about as good a subjective test of poetry as any I can come up with :) It is interesting, incidentally to compare the sentiments expressed with those in If.

Background

  They are the most unlikely of friends. Archy is a cockroach with the soul
  of a poet, and Mehitabel is an alley cat who traces her lineage back to
  Cleopatra. Not to a cat in Cleopatra's time, mind you, but Cleopatra
  herself. Together, cockroach and cat form the foundation of one of the
  most engaging collections of light poetry to come out of the early
  twentieth century.
  [...]
  The drawings that accompany some of these poems are by the brilliant
  cartoonist George Herriman, creator of the Krazy Kat comic strip. You'll
  find them in just about all of the Archy and Mehitabel books.

– the archy and mehitabel page,

http://www.sfo.com/~batt/archy/index.html

We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning, and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about on the keys. He did not see us, and we watched him. He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward, and his weight and the impact of the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another. He could not work the capital letters, and he had a great deal of difficulty operating the mechanism that shifts the paper so that a fresh line may be started. We never saw a cockroach work so hard or perspire so freely in all our lives before. After about an hour of this frightfully difficult literary labor he fell to the floor exhausted, and we saw him creep feebly into a nest of the poems which are always there in profusion.

Congratulating ourself that we had left a sheet of paper in the machine the night before so that all this work had not been in vain, we made an examination, and this is what we found:

    expression is the need of my soul
    i was once a vers libre bard
    but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
    it has given me a new outlook upon life
    i see things from the under side now
    ...
    (rest of poem snipped)

– Don Marquis, ‘the coming of archy’

  mehitabel s soul formerly inhabited a
  human also at least that
  is what mehitabel is claiming these
  days it may be she got jealous of
  my prestige anyhow she and
  i have been talking it over in a
  friendly way who were you
  mehitabel i asked her i was
  cleopatra once she said well i said i
  suppose you lived in a palace you bet
  she said and what lovely fish dinners
  we used to have and licked her chops

– Marquis, from ‘mehitabel was once cleopatra’

Biographical Notes

Who was Don Marquis and who cares?

Donald Robert Perry Marquis 1878-1937, was a newspaper columnist, humorist, poet, playwright and author of about 35 books of which the best known are books of humorous poetry about Archy the cockroach and Mehitabel the cat. Don’s work appeared regularly in the New York Sun and the Saturday Evening Post, among other places.

Don still had enough fans in 1978 that several dozen people assembled in Port Townsend, Washington, to celebrate his 100th birthday. Among the celebrants were Frank Herbert, author of the Dune trilogy; William McCollum, Jr., editor of The Don Marquis Letters (Northwoods Press) and the now-defunct Don Marquis Newsletter; Bob Lyon of The Non-Profit Press who published Don’s play Everything’s Jake in honor of the occasion; and Jim Ennes, author of Assault on the Liberty (Random House). The group shared cocktails, dinner, conversation, speeches, stories about Don, and Baked Beans Ambrosia prepared exactly as Don says beans should be prepared in The Almost Perfect State.

– The Don Marquis page at http://www.halcyon.com/jim/donmarquis/

Criticism

“Archy and his racy pal Mehitabel are timeless,” noted E. B. White in his essay on Don Marquis and his famous creations, and the undimmed enthusiasm of several generations of fans –who every year buy thousands of copies of Marquis’ earlier collections–testifies to their appeal. A whimsical and sophisticated sage, archy the cockroach entertained readers with iconoclastic observations on pretensions, politics, and our place in the cosmos during Marquis’ career as a New York newspaper columnist in the 1920s and 30s.

– From reviews of ‘archyology’, a posthumous collection

http://www.dartmouth.edu/acad-inst/upne/s961.html

— Martin