Understanding "And the Fly" by Mary Howitt
Mary Howitt (1799–1866) wrote hundreds of poems for children and adults during the Victorian era. Most people know her for "The Spider and the Fly," which survives because of the line about vanity. "And the Fly" is less famous but shares the same moralizing DNA. The poem centers on a fly that gets caught—often in web or honey—and uses the image as a straightforward warning about temptation or carelessness. That is about the level of detail you will get from a quick search. The poem works as a cautionary narrative, not a celebration of insect behavior. Howitt structures it the way she structured most of her moral verse: a character makes a choice, suffers a consequence, and the reader is expected to draw the lesson. If you read it expecting subtle irony or modern psychological depth, you will be disappointed. It is what it is. A fly sees something appealing, moves toward it, and gets trapped. The moral follows directly. I have been reading Victorian children's poetry for a long time. What trips people up is assuming Howitt is being wry the way later poets like Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll would be. She is not. She writes to instruct. The language is plain, the rhyme scheme is predictable, and the message lands with minimal ambiguity. That is a feature, not a bug, for the genre.
Why This Poem Still Comes Up
It resurfaces occasionally in English literature classes when teachers cover the broader tradition of animal fables in Romantic and Victorian verse. Students encounter "The Spider and the Fly" far more often, so "And the Fly" usually appears in compilations rather than as a standalone text. The poem itself is short enough to assign in a single sitting. The themes overlap heavily with Aesop and with Howitt's own spider poem. The fly represents the same kind of reckless desire that the spider's prey represents—curiosity without caution. One practical thing worth noting: the poem appears in several different collections under slightly different titles. You may see it listed as simply "The Fly" or grouped with other nature-themed verses. The text is essentially the same, but pagination and editorial notes vary depending on which edition you use. If you are teaching or citing it, check the publication date of the version you are working from. Early nineteenth-century printings sometimes alter line breaks or punctuation in ways that affect how the moral lands on the page.
A Closer Look at the Poem's Structure
Howitt typically writes in ballad meter or near-ballad meter for these kinds of pieces. You get alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter, with an ABCB or AABB rhyme scheme depending on the poem. "And the Fly" follows a similar pattern. The rhythm is steady, almost sing-song, which was intentional—children's verse at the time was meant to be recited aloud, sometimes even set to music. The simplicity of the meter keeps the focus on the moral rather than on linguistic complexity. I remember editing a classroom handout that included this poem alongside Crabbe's "The Newspaper" and a few other moral tales from the same period. The contrast was striking. Crabbe was grim and observational. Howitt was directive and neat. The fly in her poem does not get a nuanced portrayal. It acts, it fails, and the poem tells you exactly what to think about it. That clarity is useful for students learning to identify poetic form alongside theme, but it also means the poem does not reward close reading in the same way a harder text would.
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Common Misreadings
Sometimes readers project modern environmental or ecological sensibilities onto Howitt and assume the poem is sympathetic to the fly. It is not. The fly is a cautionary figure, not a victim. Another mistake is treating the poem as autobiographical. Howitt wrote broadly across genres—travel writing, biographies, hymns, children's verse. There is no evidence that "And the Fly" draws from a personal experience with insects. It is constructed verse, not memoir. There is also a minor textual issue worth knowing about. Some anthologies conflate Howitt's "The Fly" with other poems of the same title by different authors. If you pull a version from an incomplete online source, you may end up with someone else's fly poem attributed to Howitt. I learned this the hard way once when preparing a syllabus. I spent twenty minutes analyzing a poem that turned out to be by a completely different writer. Always verify the text against a reliable edition before building any analysis around it.
Where to Find the Text
The poem appears in collected editions of Howitt's work. The most accessible versions are available through Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, both of which host public-domain scans of nineteenth-century publications. You can also find it in academic anthologies of Victorian children's literature if you have library access. The Gutenberg texts are free but sometimes contain OCR errors, so compare lines if something looks off. The Internet Archive scans of original books are usually more accurate since they preserve the printed page. If you need a clean modern edition for teaching purposes, look for a scholarly volume that includes editorial notes. These will typically flag variant readings and provide context about when and where the poem first appeared. That extra work saves time later when you are trying to answer questions about the poem's publication history or its relationship to Howitt's other animal fables.
What to Do If You Are Assigning This Poem
Pair it with "The Spider and the Fly." The two poems together give students a clear sense of Howitt's approach to animal morality tales. Ask them to compare how each insect behaves, how each narrator comments on that behavior, and how the outcomes differ. You can also place it next to Christopher Smart's "The Fly" or Edward Taylor's metaphysical fly poems if you want to show how the same subject matter gets treated very differently across centuries. The contrast between Howitt's straightforward moral and Taylor's theological wrestling with a gnat is particularly useful. One edge case I ran into: students sometimes ask whether the fly in the poem is meant to represent a specific type of person. The answer is no, not specifically. Howitt's flies and spiders are archetypes, not character studies. The poem works best when read as part of a long tradition of fable verse rather than as a standalone psychological portrait. Telling students that upfront prevents them from chasing interpretations that the text does not support. The poem is short, morally direct, and firmly rooted in its period. It does not ask for anything complicated from the reader. It gives you a fly, a trap, and a lesson. That is all there is to it.
