The Mosquito Knows

The mosquito knows full well, small as he is

he’s a beast of prey.

But after all

he only takes his bellyful,

he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.

This poem is in the public domain.

“The Mosquito Knows” was published in D. H. Lawrence’s Pansies: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), the penultimate collection to be released before his death. About the poem, Thomas Allen Smailes, a scholar of D. H. Lawrence, writes in his book Some Comments on the Verse of D. H. Lawrence (University of Port Elizabeth, 1970), “There is chagrin in ‘The Mosquito Knows.’ The lines gain strength from their quiet reasonableness. The ‘bellyful’ makes human greed disgusting by contrast. Lawrence sees only one way of bringing this human parasitism to an end.”

D.H. Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England, on September 11, 1885. Lawrence’s poetry collections include Pansies (Martin Secker, 1929); Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (Thomas Seltzer, 1923); and Look! We Have Come Through (B. W. Huebsch, 1917). Though best known as a novelist, particularly for Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Privately Printed, 1928), both Lawrence’s poetry and prose were a continual source of controversy, often involved in widely publicized censorship cases. He died on March 2, 1930, in Vence, France.