Kevin Halligan, ‘The Cockroach’

1 I watched a giant cockroach start to pace,

2 Skirting a ball of dust that rode the floor.
3 At first he seemed quite satisfied to trace
4 A path between the wainscot and the door,
5 But soon he turned to jog in crooked rings,
6 Circling the rusty table leg and back,
7 And flipping right over to scratch his wings-
8 As if the victim of a mild attack
9 Of restlessness that worsened over time.
10 After a while, he climbed an open shelf
11 And stopped. He looked uncertain where to go.
12 Was this due payment for some vicious crime
13 A former life had led to? I don’t know
14 Except I thought I recognized myself.

INTRODUCTION
In "The Cockroach," Canadian poet Kevin Halligan uses the tale of a wandering roach to wryly
explore the difficulty of finding purpose in life. The poem's speaker watches idly as a cockroach
crawls around their room. The cockroach forges a straight path at first, but then it seems to lose
confidence: it spins in circles, rambles around, climbs a shelf and looks stumped. The speaker
feels this bug's indecision and perplexity as a mirror of their own situation: perhaps the
speaker, too, is little more than an aimless bug trying to figure out what on earth it's doing. This
poem, which takes the form of a sonnet, first appeared in Halligan's 2009 collection Utopia.

SUMMARY
The poem's speaker describes the day when they watched a cockroach crawl across the floor,
dodging a dust bunny [small clumps of dust that form under furniture and in corners that are not cleaned
regularly] as it went. At first, the speaker observes, the cockroach seemed content to walk in a
straight line between the wall paneling and the door. But soon, the cockroach turned around
and started wandering in circles around the table leg, then rolling over to scratch its wings; it
was as if the cockroach were feeling more and more restless as time went on. Eventually, the
cockroach climbed up a shelf and stopped, looking unsure what to do next. The speaker
wondered: was this cockroach's discomfort a fitting payment for some dreadful behavior in a
past life? All the speaker knew was, they saw the cockroach as a mirror of their own
predicament.

1
THEMES
Aimlessness, Confusion, and Purpose
“The Cockroach” draws a tongue-in-cheek comparison between a wandering bug and a
confused speaker, suggesting that a sense of meaning and direction can be hard to find in life.
The poem’s speaker watches as a cockroach crawls across the floor. At first, the roach seems
set on a “path between the wainscot and the door,” a straight shot from the wall paneling to
the way out. But then, some confusion seems to impede the bug. The cockroach begins to
wander in “crooked rings” around the table, to irritably “scratch his wings” in “restlessness,"
and at last to come to a perplexed halt at the top of a shelf, as if “uncertain where to go” next.
The speaker, observing the roach’s inconclusive wanderings, starts to philosophize. Perhaps,
they suggest, the bug’s predicament is a punishment for “some vicious crime” he committed in
a “former life.” But really, that’s just an idle theory; there’s no way to tell why this roach is in
the situation he’s in. All the speaker can conclude is that the cockroach’s life feels familiar: “I
thought I recognized myself,” they declare. In other words, the speaker feels just as lost,
aimless, and confused as the cockroach does, and the speaker doesn't have any better
explanation for their predicament than they do for the cockroach's.
The speaker’s unsuccessful attempt to figure out why the cockroach might be wandering
around this way—and their sense that they and the cockroach share the same difficulty—
suggest that human life can feel as mysterious, purposeless, and insignificant as the ramblings
of a lowly bug. With no clear sense of why they've ended up living the life they do, this poem
implies, the speaker has ended up wandering around looking for meaning and direction that
they can’t really find. By comparing their own life with that of a roach—not a fragile but
beautiful butterfly or a roving ladybug, but a pest—the speaker at least offers the consoling
thought that they can find some humor in this predicament by not taking themselves too
seriously.

Where this theme appears in the poem: Lines 1-14

LINE-BY-LINE EXPLANATION & ANALYSIS OF “THE COCKROACH”

Lines 1-4
1 I watched a giant cockroach start to pace,
2 Skirting a ball of dust that rode the floor. skirting - to go around the edge of something

3 At first he seemed quite satisfied to trace wainscot - an area of wooden paneling on the lower part
of the walls of a room
4 A path between the wainscot and the door,

"The Cockroach" begins with a scene of mild squalor [the state of being very dirty, untidy or unpleasant]. The
speaker sits in their room watching passively as a “giant cockroach start[s] to pace” across the

2
none-too-clean floor, “skirting a ball of dust” that seems to have been “riding the floor” for
some time.
The speaker doesn’t seem bothered by the sight of a cockroach wandering across the room. If
anything, he feels mild interest, tracking the bug as it “traces a path” from the “wainscot” (the
wall paneling) to the door. Maybe he even has some degree of fellow feeling for this cockroach.
He anthropomorphizes his leggy guest: he calls it “him” rather than “it,” suggest that the bug
seems “quite satisfied” with the “path” it’s chosen to take, and imagine that it “paces” across
the floor like a thoughtful professor (rather than, say, scuttling or creeping).
This imaginative description gives the first hints that this roach will become more to the
speaker than an unwelcome pest. The cockroach—sharing the speaker’s dirty room like another
person—will hold up a mirror to the speaker’s own predicament.
Wryly, the speaker frames this tale of relating to vermin in an elegant old form: the sonnet, a
14-line poem written in iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-
DUM rhythm, as in “I watched | a gi- | ant cock- | roach start | to pace”). These first four lines
also feature the alternating ABAB rhyme scheme typical of a Shakespearean sonnet. Framing
this poem in the favorite verse style of Petrarch and Shakespeare, the speaker applies a touch
of tongue-in-cheek formality to their story of relating a little too well to a cockroach.

Lines 5-9
5 But soon he turned to jog in crooked rings,
6 Circling the rusty table leg and back,
7 And flipping right over to scratch his wings-
8 As if the victim of a mild attack
9 Of restlessness that worsened over time.

These lines use a cockroach’s actions as an extended metaphor—possibly reflecting on human behavior, mental
states, or even existential anxiety.
“But soon he turned to jog in crooked rings,”
The cockroach begins to move in erratic, circular patterns. "Jog" suggests quick, jittery movement, and "crooked rings"
implies that the path is not smooth or purposeful—it's unpredictable and confused. This might suggest a lack of direction,
or inner turmoil.
“Circling the rusty table leg and back,”
He scurries repeatedly around a rusty table leg. The repetition and focus on something so mundane (and old, as
suggested by "rusty") adds to the sense of meaningless or trapped motion—perhaps symbolizing routine or a
monotonous life cycle.
“And flipping right over to scratch his wings—”
This unusual movement—flipping over—may show discomfort or unease. The cockroach isn’t just walking anymore; it’s
showing signs of physical or psychological disturbance, perhaps mirroring how people react when unsettled.
“As if the victim of a mild attack
Of restlessness that worsened over time.”
Here, the poet explicitly likens the cockroach’s behavior to someone suffering from growing anxiety or unease. The word

3
"mild" suggests it’s not dramatic at first, but it becomes more serious. It hints at how small worries or dissatisfaction in
life can gradually escalate.
Overall Meaning:
These lines show the cockroach becoming increasingly agitated and disturbed. While describing literal behavior, Kevin
Halligan is also likely using the cockroach as a metaphor for human beings—especially those who feel aimless, stuck in
routines, or slowly overwhelmed by mental or emotional unrest. The growing restlessness mirrors a human psychological
journey.
Symbolism in Relation to the Poet:
1. The Cockroach as a Symbol of the Self:
o The cockroach’s behavior is symbolic of the poet’s own mental or emotional state. He watches
the cockroach closely, but this observation turns inward—as if he sees himself mirrored in the
insect’s actions.
o The "crooked rings" may symbolize life’s lack of direction or the feeling of going in circles—an
experience common in times of existential doubt or depression.
o Existential doubt refers to a deep and often unsettling questioning of the meaning, purpose, or
value of life. It's a type of inner conflict where a person wonders:
• Why am I here?
• What is the point of life?
• Does anything I do really matter?
• Is there any deeper meaning to my existence, or is life just random and meaningless?
This kind of doubt is linked to existentialism, a philosophical movement that explores individual freedom, choice,
responsibility, and the often uncomfortable truth that life doesn’t come with clear answers.
2. The Rusty Table Leg:
o This could represent the mundane, decaying structures in life—things that we repeatedly return
to despite them being worn out, meaningless, or lifeless.
o The cockroach circling it may symbolize the poet's entrapment in routine or old habits that offer
no satisfaction.
3. Flipping Over and Scratching Wings:
o This strange behavior could symbolize mental discomfort or inner conflict—like when someone
is unsettled or frustrated but can’t express it clearly.
o The poet may be suggesting he feels emotionally off-balance or struggling to “adjust” something
within himself, much like the cockroach adjusting its wings.
4. “Victim of a mild attack / of restlessness…”
o This line strongly reflects the poet's own growing restlessness or anxiety. It may be mild at first,
but it intensifies over time—perhaps symbolizing a personal crisis or growing dissatisfaction with
life.
o It could also suggest a fear of losing control, or feeling out of place in a chaotic, unpredictable
world.
Overall Symbolic Interpretation:
The cockroach, through its strange and increasingly frantic behavior, becomes a mirror for the poet’s own
psychological condition. Halligan may be using it to explore:
• A crisis of identity
• The fear of losing control or purpose
• The monotony and absurdity of life
• Or even a moment of self-realization, as the poet projects his own emotions onto the creature.

4
As the speaker watches, the cockroach that began its journey across the room by walking a
straight “path between the wainscot and the door” now seems to lose focus and direction. The
bug “turns to jog in crooked rings,” wanders aimlessly around the “rusty table leg,” then pauses
to “scratch his wings” in irritated confusion. Again, the speaker anthropomorphizes the roach,
seeing his actions not as the instinctive impulses of a mindless pest, but as signs of a “mild” but
“worsening” “attack of restlessness.” Indeed, he's the “victim” of this “attack of restlessness,” a
persecuted sufferer. This cockroach has ennui [ennui • \ahn-WEE\ • noun. : a feeling of weariness and dissatisfaction :
boredom.].

The poem’s imagery paints a picture of the bug’s restlessness—and gives a glimpse of the
speaker’s unlovely surroundings. The “crooked rings” the roach traces as it “jogs” around the
table leg suggest that it’s not trying to perform an elegant loop-de-loop maneuver, for instance,
but getting lost. And the “rust” on that table leg, like the “ball of dust” the roach dodged
earlier, suggests that the speaker isn’t taking great care of their room. Everything here is just a
little dingy.
The poem’s rhythms mirror the bug’s irritable wanderings, too. The enjambment in lines 8-9
breaks the speaker’s sentence in a spot where one would never pause in ordinary speech:
As if the victim of a mild attack
Of restlessness that worsened over time.
The jolting split between “attack” and “Of restlessness” feels as awkward as the cockroach’s
“crooked rings.” There's discomfort in the poem's very sounds.

Lines 10-14
10 After a while, he climbed an open shelf
11 And stopped. He looked uncertain where to go.
12 Was this due payment for some vicious crime
13 A former life had led to? I don’t know
14 Except I thought I recognized myself.

“After a while, he climbed an open shelf / And stopped.”

The cockroach climbs to a higher place (an open shelf) and suddenly pauses.
This physical stop might suggest a moment of confusion, hesitation, or contemplation—as if it’s unsure of its next
move.
Symbolically, it reflects a turning point or moment of reckoning—possibly a mental or emotional pause in the
poet’s life.
“He looked uncertain where to go.”
The cockroach seems lost or unsure of what to do next.
This is an important moment: the poet is projecting human emotions like uncertainty, doubt, or lack of direction
onto the insect.
It mirrors how people often feel at crossroads in life, unsure of their next steps.

5
“Was this due payment for some vicious crime / A former life had led to?”
The poet wonders: Is the cockroach being punished for something bad it did in a past life?
This introduces the idea of karma or retribution—that present suffering may come from past wrongs.
It could reflect the poet’s own feelings of guilt, regret, or fear that he might be paying for mistakes from his past.
The word vicious suggests something serious or cruel—indicating deep, possibly moral or emotional turmoil.
“I don’t know / Except I thought I recognized myself.”
The poet admits he has no clear answers, but suddenly realizes something important:
In watching the cockroach, he sees a reflection of himself.
This is the moment of self-identification. The cockroach becomes a symbol for the poet—its restlessness,
confusion, and uncertain behavior mirror his own inner struggles.
Symbolism and Meaning:
In these lines, the cockroach becomes a metaphor for the human condition, especially the poet’s own:
• The cockroach’s aimless movement reflects the poet’s existential doubt—questioning the purpose of life.
• Its pause and confusion show uncertainty about the future—a feeling many people experience.
• The mention of a “vicious crime” suggests guilt, regret, or fear of moral consequences—perhaps the poet
is haunted by past choices.
• The final realization (“I thought I recognized myself”) shows that the poem is not really about the
cockroach—it’s about the poet’s self-reflection, his mental state, and a possible identity crisis.
In short:
These lines reveal that the cockroach’s strange behavior mirrors the poet’s own emotional journey—his
uncertainty, inner restlessness, and the search for meaning in life. The poem ends with a moment of quiet self-
awareness, making it a powerful example of how we sometimes find ourselves reflected in the smallest, most
unexpected things.
At last, the cockroach decides to stop wandering around on the floor and try something new.
He “climbs an open shelf” as if it were a hilltop and he were trying to get some perspective.
(Note the openness of that shelf, too: the speaker’s room is as bare as it’s grimy.) But no clarity
is forthcoming: atop the shelf, the roach stops, looking “uncertain where to go.” The poem
uses caesurae here to mirror the roach’s actions:
After a while, || he climbed an open shelf
And stopped. || He looked uncertain where to go.
The comma in line 10 pauses the line and lets it change direction just as the roach does. Then
the period in line 11 brings the line to an abrupt halt at just the moment the roach freezes in
uncertainty.
The speaker, still watching, takes this opportunity to philosophize in lines 12-13:
Was this due payment for some vicious crime
A former life had led to? […]
The awkward enjambment between the lines draws attention to an ambiguous question. The
speaker here wonders whether the roach has been reincarnated this way as punishment for
some transgression [wrong doing] in a past life. But these words could mean several things at once.
Is the speaker asking whether the roach’s reincarnation as a roach is punishment for past
crimes? Or is the speaker asking whether the roach’s confusion is its punishment?

6
Even the speaker seems to throw his hands up over the question, whatever it is. “I don’t know,”
he concludes; there’s no figuring out why this roach has ended up in the predicament it’s in. All
he can say is that he feels he “recognizes” the roach: this bug’s situation mirrors his own.
If that’s so, then the speaker, too, feels like he has no idea where he’s going or why. The
speaker, too, feels like a “victim,” nervous that he’s being punished for no reason he can
fathom. And the speaker, too, feels stuck, “uncertain” about life itself. The roach becomes a
symbol of his very self—and perhaps of humanity in general. Who, this speaker seems to ask,
can really answer the big questions about why we’re here or what we’re doing with ourselves?
Perhaps the only real conclusion this speaker comes to is that a degree of humility and humor
might help them to cope with their predicament. Finding fellow feeling with a cockroach—
likewise lost, likewise living in this dingy room—he presents himself as just another bug doing
its best.

SYMBOLS
The Cockroach
The cockroach becomes a symbol for the speaker in particular, but perhaps also a symbol for
humanity in general. When it makes its appearance on the speaker’s floor, the cockroach
appears to be at a loss for goals. As the speaker watches, the roach crawls around in circles,
with no apparent idea of where it’s going or what it’s trying to do. This aimlessness feels all too
familiar to the speaker: “I thought I recognized myself,” they say, seeing in the cockroach’s
wanderings an image of their own confusion and uncertainty. The speaker, in other words, has
no clear sense of where they’re going in life or why, any more than this bug does.
By choosing the lowly cockroach as a symbol of their own confused life, the speaker pokes fun
at themselves—and perhaps at everybody else, too. Perhaps, the symbolism suggests, we’re all
just bugs wandering in circles, trying to figure out what to do in a world where no one can ever
really know why we’re here or what we should be doing with ourselves.

Where this symbol appears in the poem: Lines 1-14

POETIC DEVICES & FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

Anthropomorphism
All through “The Cockroach,” the speaker anthropomorphizes a cockroach, interpreting a bug’s
actions as if they were those of a person. This cockroach is a “he,” the speaker decides: a little
guy trying to figure out where to go and what to do.
“At first,” the speaker observes, the cockroach seems “quite satisfied” to crawl along
purposefully, charting a straight line from the wall to the door. But the longer the speaker
watches, the more they see confusion, irritation, and aimlessness in the cockroach’s actions.
When the cockroach stops to “scratch his wings,” for instance, the speaker imagines that the

7
bug is “the victim of a mild attack / Of restlessness.” And when the cockroach at last comes to a
halt on a bookshelf, the speaker thinks he looks “uncertain where to go.”
By anthropomorphizing the bug, reading human emotions into its small and aimless trek across
the room, the speaker demonstrates a feeling they end up stating explicitly at the end of the
poem: they “recogniz[e]” the bug as an image of their own aimlessness and uncertainty.
Besides suggesting that human lives might be as small and meaningless as bug lives, this
comparison injects some humor and fellow feeling into the poem: Roach, you and I are in this
together, the poem seems to say.

Where anthropomorphism appears in the poem: Lines 3-11

Imagery
Dashes of imagery comically capture the wanderings of this poem's titular roach. When the
speaker notices a cockroach making its way across their room, they don’t describe it as scuttling
or crawling, as many bug-observers might. Rather, they describe it “start[ing] to pace” across
the floor, as if it’s deep in thought with its feelers crossed behind its back. That stately progress
soon turns to confusion: the cockroach ends up “jog[ging] in crooked rings,” wandering in rough
circles, clearly at a loss for where to go.
These descriptions of the cockroach’s wandering motion help readers to imagine it more as a
tiny little person than a bug. The cockroach’s pacing and jogging create an image of nervous,
frantic energy—the movements of a creature that really has no idea what it’s trying to do,
but wishes it did. This imagery also helps to suggest that the speaker might be projecting some
of their own feelings onto the roach, anthropomorphizing it as they ponder their aimlessness in
life.
The poem's imagery also helps readers to picture the room where the speaker sits. The
cockroach has to “skirt[] a dust ball” to make its way across the floor and ends up “circling the
rusty table leg” and climbing up an “open shelf.” All of these images suggest a bare and run-
down room: no books on the shelf, dust on the floor, rust on the table. Perhaps this ever-so-
slightly bleak backdrop contributes to the speaker’s feeling of being lost in the world. This
doesn’t sound like the most comfortable or pleasant place to find oneself feeling stuck.

Where imagery appears in the poem:

Lines 1-2: “a giant cockroach start to pace, / Skirting a ball of dust that rode the floor”
Lines 5-6: “he turned to jog in crooked rings, / Circling the rusty table leg and back”
Line 10: “he climbed an open shelf”

8
Caesura
Caesurae help the poem's shape and rhythms to resemble what it describes: the hesitant,
herky-jerky motions of a cockroach.
No caesurae at all appear in the first nine lines of the poem, when the speaker first observes
the cockroach making a dash across the room. During this stretch of time, the cockroach is
scrambling around frenetically: not choosing any one direction to crawl in, but also not stopping
and starting.
It's when the roach finally seems to give up that mid-line pauses enter the poem. Listen to the
changed rhythms of lines 10-11:
After a while, || he climbed an open shelf
And stopped. || He looked uncertain where to go.
The comma in line 10 slows the poem's pace down. Then, the period in line 11 brings it to a full
and emphatic stop—at just the same moment that the roach stops to consider its options. The
poem's shape matches its action; readers have to lurch to a halt in the middle of things just as
the roach does.
The poem's final caesura, which appears in line 13, injects a wry note into the speaker's voice:
Was this due payment for some vicious crime
A former life had led to? || I don’t know
Here, the caesura at the question mark lends some comical gravity to a rather melodramatic
question: "Is this roach paying for its past crimes with a reincarnation of buggy indecision?" The
mid-line break leaves that question hanging dramatically for a moment before the speaker
deflates it with an exasperated "I don't know."

Where caesura appears in the poem:

Line 10: “while, he”
Line 11: “stopped. He”
Line 13: “to? I”

Enjambment
Unpredictable enjambments give the poem a jolting rhythm that chimes with the cockroach's
(and the speaker's) indecision. For the most part, the poem's lines are end-stopped. When
enjambments appear here, then, they surprise the reader, yanking the eye across line breaks.
The poem's first enjambment, for instance, appears between lines 3-4:
At first he seemed quite satisfied to trace
A path between the wainscot and the door,
Here, the enjambment falls at a particularly awkward spot, a place where there wouldn't be
even a hint of a pause in everyday speech. While the speaker describes the cockroach's

9
apparently purposeful "path," the poem's rhythm says something different: the cockroach's
beeline (if you will) for the exit is already a little crooked.
There's a similarly jolting enjambment in lines 8-9:
As if the victim of a mild attack
Of restlessness that worsened over time.
Again, a line break falls in an awkward, unnatural place. Here, readers might feel the poem's
rhythm imitating the cockroach's sudden "attack / Of restlessness" as it irritably "scratch[es]" its
wings with a back leg.
The poem's final enjambment draws attention to a comically grand question:
Was this due payment for some vicious crime
A former life had led to? [...]
Here, the odd enjambment insists that readers stop and spend a minute dealing with the
speaker's ambiguous, ungainly phrasing (did the cockroach's former life lead to a crime, or did
the cockroach merely commit a crime in a former life? Is its punishment "being a cockroach" or
"being a confused cockroach"?). The confusion in the language here mirrors the confusion of
speaker and of roach.

Where enjambment appears in the poem:

Lines 3-4: “trace / A”
Lines 8-9: “attack / Of”
Lines 12-13: “crime / A”

FORM, METER, & RHYME SCHEME

Form
“The Cockroach” is a sonnet—a 14-line poem written in iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs,
metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “I watched | a gi- | ant cock-
| roach start | to pace”). However, it breaks away from the traditional sonnet form in a few
ways. First off, there's the rhyme scheme:
• Most sonnets stick to one of two traditional patterns of rhyme. The English
sonnet rhymes ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, while the Italian sonnet rhymes ABBA ABBA and
concludes with a sestet (a six-line passage) that mixes C, D, and E rhymes in various
patterns.
• Here, Halligan starts out with the English rhyme pattern: ABAB CDCD. Then he switches
to a more Italianate ending, with closing rhymes running EFG EGF.
Already, things are a little off-kilter. Then, in the middle of the poem, this sonnet starts to feel
downright askew. Typically, a sonnet that’s divided into an octave (an eight-line passage) and
a sestet (a six-line passage) introduces a volta between lines 8 and 9: a turning point when one

10
thought finishes and a new or contrasting idea enters the poem. Instead, lines 8-10 here lurch
off in an unconventional direction:
As if the victim of a mild attack
Of restlessness that worsened over time.
After a while, he climbed an open shelf
Rather than concluding an idea neatly in line 8, Halligan carries his observations of the
wandering cockroach over into closing sestet, throwing the traditional form even further out of
balance.
This choice feels right in keeping with the cockroach’s (and the speaker’s) discombobulation
and aimlessness. This speaker might wish that life felt as tightly structured as a traditional
sonnet—but disorder always seems to intrude.

Meter
Like most sonnets, “The Cockroach” is written in iambic pentameter. That means that its lines
each use five iambs—metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in line 1:
I watched | a gi- | ant cock- | roach start | to pace
This fills the poem with a steady, familiar pulse. The poem doesn’t stick to that rhythm perfectly
the whole way through, though (few sonnets do). For instance, line 2 switches up its first foot:
Skirting | a ball | of dust | that rode | the floor.
“Skirting” is not an iamb, but a trochee—the opposite foot, with a DUM-da rhythm. That
change creates a jaunty little swing in the line, harmonizing with the image of the cockroach
swerving to avoid that dust ball.
Elsewhere, Halligan introduces some stranger variations in the rhythm, as in line 7:
And flip- | ping right | over | to scratch | his wings—
The colliding stressed syllables in “right over” wedge an ungainly trochee right into the middle
of the line—just at the moment the cockroach’s sense of “restlessness” really takes hold. This
awkwardness reflects the poem’s big theme: a sense that life doesn’t just tick smoothly and
artfully along.

Rhyme Scheme
“The Cockroach” combines the rhyme schemes of an English and an Italian sonnet. The poem's
first eight lines use the alternating pattern of an English sonnet (which rhymes ABAB CDCD EFEF
GG), while the closing six lines, with their changing three-rhyme pattern, borrow from the
flexible ending of an Italian sonnet (which starts out rhyming ABBA ABBA and ends with some
combination of C, D, and E rhymes). Altogether, the rhyme scheme looks like this:
ABAB CDCD EFG EGF
This mixed-up rhyme scheme suits a tale of confusion and disorientation. This sonnet kicks off
in one rhyme scheme, only to abandon it, losing itself in disorderly wanderings—just as the

11
cockroach starts out heading in a straight line toward the door, then finds itself turning in
aimless circles.

SPEAKER
The speaker of "The Cockroach" is a rueful, self-deprecating, playfully philosophical person, and
perhaps they're also a person who is down on their luck. Over the course of the poem, they
watch a “giant cockroach” traversing their room—a room whose “dust ball[s]” and “rusty table
legs” suggest that the speaker isn’t living in the cleanest or most pleasant surroundings. The
speaker doesn't seem at all perturbed that an enormous cockroach has turned up in their room;
they just watch it wander around as if massive household bugs are an everyday sight for them.
For that matter, the speaker doesn’t appear to have much to do besides watching a cockroach
meandering around the room. No wonder, then, that they relate to that cockroach’s aimless
wanderings. In this cockroach, they see an image of their own predicament, and perhaps of a
lot of people’s predicament: a difficulty in figuring out what they’re doing, why they’re doing it,
and how they ended up here at all.
The speaker’s identification with household vermin also suggests a kind of amused, self-
deprecating humility. Plenty of bugs scuttle around aimlessly—but this speaker feels more akin
to a pesky roach than, say, a flitting butterfly.

SETTING
The poem takes place in the speaker's room, as the speaker watches a cockroach scurrying
around. The “wainscot” on the speaker’s walls—a kind of wooden paneling most popular
before the 20th century—suggests an older building, while the “rusty table leg” and “ball of
dust” the cockroach circles suggest a room that isn’t in particularly good order. Then, of course,
there’s the fact that a “giant cockroach” is crawling around in here at all! The speaker doesn’t
seem surprised or dismayed by the appearance of the huge bug, but rather watches it with
curiosity; such leggy visitations seem like part of their everyday life.
These peeks at the speaker’s room might hint that their identification with the cockroach
doesn’t just have to do with a general sense of purposelessness, but a specific (and tongue-in-
cheek) sense of grime, dinginess, and lowliness. The setting reflects the speaker’s sense of their
own situation: they feel as confused, disoriented, and humble as the cockroach, and who has
time to sweep up dust bunnies when one’s very purpose in life feels uncertain?

LITERARY AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Literary Context
Kevin Halligan (1964-present) is a Canadian poet. Born in Toronto, he lived abroad for many
years in Cambodia and England. He has published three volumes of poetry: Blossom

12
Street (1999), The Belfast of the North (2005), and Utopia (2009) (in which "The Cockroach" was
first collected).
“The Cockroach” shows the influence of several different branches of literary history.
The sonnet form Halligan plays with here goes back to the Middle Ages—so in one sense, this
poem draws on a grand old poetic lineage, handed down
from Shakespeare to Milton to Keats to Barrett Browning. The idea of seeing a human
reflection in the natural world might also come across as rather capital-R Romantic: the Scottish
Romantic poet Robert Burns, for instance, famously gazed on a cowering mouse and reflected
that the "best-laid schemes o' Mice and Men" alike go wrong.
But this speaker’s cheeky, deflating vision of himself as a wandering cockroach might also owe
something to Franz Kafka’s 1915 The Metamorphosis (in which the unfortunate Gregor Samsa
famously wakes up one morning to discover he’s been transformed into a monstrous bug) and
to Don Marquis' 1927 archy and mehitabel (in which a hip vers libre poet is reincarnated as a
cockroach, much to his exasperation). By tweaking an elegant, rigorous poetic form and uniting
it with comically grotesque bug symbolism, Halligan pokes fun at literary tradition as much as
human foibles.

Historical Context
“The Cockroach” displays a very turn-of-the-20th-century sense of humor. The poem’s choice to
examine the big questions about life through the tale of a cockroach (and to use the elegant
sonnet form to do so) reflects a 1990s-2000s taste for deflating old tropes, traditions, and
values. (Carol Ann Duffy's 1999 The World's Wife, in which she satirizes male historical and
literary greats by presenting them through the eyes of their fed-up wives, might serve as one
good contemporary poetic example.)
But the poem might also show the mark of some darker uncertainties. Halligan published this
poem while he was living in Cambodia in 2009. When Halligan moved there, Cambodia had only
recently emerged from years of civil war, a conflict that succeeded the long and terrible
dictatorship of the murderous Pol Pot. Cambodia established a fragile democracy in 1993, but
the new government was also riddled with corruption. The country suffers from riots, poverty,
and political suppression to this day. As a Canadian immigrant coming to terms with this
backdrop of violence and fear, Halligan might well have struggled more seriously with questions
about life’s meaning and his own direction as he wrote this poem.

**************************

13