The Fly Is Welcome to Share

I enjoy this poem from William Oldys, whose life and writing-career took place chiefly in the 18th century, although he was born in 1687.

On a Fly Drinking Out of His Cup

By William Oldys (1687-1761)

BUSY, curious, thirsty fly!
Drink with me and drink as I:
Freely welcome to my cup,
Couldst thou sip and sip it up:

Make the most of life you may,
Life is short and wears away.
Both alike are mine and thine
Hastening quick to their decline:

Thine 's a summer, mine 's no more,
Though repeated to threescore.
Threescore summers, when they're gone,
Will appear as short as one!

I find much to like in just three stanzas, including the assonance in line one (curious/thirsty); the phrase "sip and sip it up"; and the assertion that once a segment of time is gone, it looks about the same as any other segment of time. It's a poem with modern sensibilities; or rather, our sensibilities do not seem to have changed all that radically compared to those of Oldys's era.

Apparently, however, the conventional wisdom back then was that flies lived a whole summer, whereas, if I'm not mistaken, their life-span is a matter of hours. (This just in from one of my colleagues in science who studies fruit flies: the life-span of most flies is more properly measured in weeks, not hours; my apologies to flies, those who study them, and those who drink with them.) Also, we associate flies with the spread of bacteria and other sources of disease, whereas Oldys seems fine with having the fly drink from his cup. Maybe the sensibility here is not so much modern as it is Zen-like, to the extent that Zen Buddhism takes a radically democratic view of all creatures.

Finally, I take pleasure in comparing this poem to Karl Shapiro's poem, "The Fly," which begins, "O hideous little bat, the size of snot," and proceeds to get more miffed with the fly from there. In class once, Shapiro claimed that he wrote the poem while serving in the military in the South Pacific during World War. He said he had a lot of pent-up rage toward the military, and he channeled it all into an irrational rage against a fly. What a great strategy for writing a poem: take the emotion one feels for one situation and rewire it to a completely different subject. Shapiro was an iconoclast by nature and by nature not a joiner of any kind, so the conformity of military life must indeed have induced some rage.

Was the beverage in Oldys's cup alcoholic, and if so, what does alcohol do to a fly? I guess it turns the creature (the insect, I mean) into a barfly.