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. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 5, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“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
David Herbert Lawrence, novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist, was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England, on September 11, 1885. Though better known as a novelist, Lawrence's first-published works (in 1909) were poems, and his poetry, especially his evocations of the natural world, have since had a significant influence on many poets on both sides of the Atlantic.