On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book

Poet: Charles Tennyson Turner — English clergyman and sonneteer; born Somersby, Lincolnshire, 1808; died 1879. The elder brother of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose fame eclipsed his own throughout his lifetime.

Year: 1873

First publication: Sonnets, Lyrics and Translations (Henry S. King & Co., 1873). Turner published several hundred sonnets across his career, almost exclusively in this form.

Themes: the accidental cruelty of human carelessness; the smallness of an insect’s life weighed against the longevity of the printed page; the ‘tomb’ of the book as both grave and memorial; meditation, conscience, and minor guilt; the Victorian taste for finding moral lessons in nature.

Form & structure: a single 14-line Petrarchan sonnet. Octave-sestet division; iambic pentameter; a moral / reflective volta after the eighth line that turns from the discovery of the dead fly to the speaker’s consideration of its strange immortality between the leaves.

Turner specialised in the small Victorian observational sonnet: a fly, a swallow, a country churchyard, a frosted hedge. His poems often turn on a quietly comic premise — here, the accident of finding an insect that has been preserved between the pages of a book — and ask the reader to think harder about it than the situation seems to warrant. The sonnet uses a mock-tomb image: the book is the fly’s sarcophagus, the printed page its monument.

The poem’s gentle conscience is characteristic of Turner. Where Tennyson reaches for grand mythic statement, Turner prefers the modest occasion: a small life, a small grief, a small reflection. This makes the poem an unusually effective comparison piece for Cambridge candidates, who can use it as a counterpoint to bigger-canvas anthology poems.

Pairs effectively with: Hardy’s He Never Expected Much (also low-key, modest stoicism); Hughes’s Hawk Roosting (contrast: the hawk’s casual cruelty vs. the human’s accidental cruelty); and Atwood’s The City Planners (small disquiet within an apparently ordered world).