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Beetles and humans

LITERATURE

In his “Ode on Melancholy” (1820), the romantic

poet John Keats urges the reader: “Make not your

rosary of yew-berries, Nor let the beetle, nor the

death-moth be, Your mournful Psyche.” The

admonition is not to indulge too freely in baleful

associations of death. “Psyche,” representing the

human soul, is often depicted as a butterfly. The

“death-moth,” on the other hand, refers to a quite

different and more nocturnal lepidopteran, the

Death’s Head Hawk Moth, a large insect with a

pattern on its thorax that resembles a human skull,

and which has long been a literary and artistic

symbol of mortality. “Yew-berries” are deadly

poisonous, and yew trees with their dark foliage

are traditionally planted in churchyards. But why

beetles? The noisy, bumbling, crepuscular flight

of beetles such as Geotrupidae, Cerambycidae:

Prioninae, and Lucanidae has long symbolized

the end of the day and the beginning of the night,

and they have become literary guardians of the

darkness, like moths, inhabitants of the veil that

separates the brightness of day from the darkness

of night (and by extension, life from death). The

same use of the beetle’s flight is seen in the earlier

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751)

in which the poet Thomas Gray describes the

evening: “Now fades the glimm’ring landscape

on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness

holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning

flight.” The beetle is the only thing breaking the

graveyard’s silence. Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606)

uses the same image and other images of darkness

to confess the murder he is planning: “Ere the bat

hath flown His cloistered flight, ere to black

Hecate’s summons The shard-borne beetle with

his drowsy hums Hath rung night’s yawning peal,

there shall be done A deed of dreadful note” (what

he means is “before dark”). “Shards” refers to the

above | Bewitching splendor: Ellen

Terry’s famous Lady Macbeth dress

was made from tropical Buprestidae

elytra, slightly out of place in

eleventh-century Scotland.