The title of Dave Bonta's poem gets in a joke before the poem begins. "The starving artist considers entomophagy" promises a grim, comic calculation: how hungry does a person have to be before insects start to look like dinner? Yet the four lines never mention eating. They describe only a day of looking, and the poem's central idea sits in the gap between the two. Hunger and attention turn out to be close relatives, and both change how big a person feels beside the rest of the living world.
The syntax is the first clue. "All this day looking at the light" has no main verb. The speaker never says "I spent" or "I watched," so the sentence trails on as a participle, as if the looking were still going on and had not yet been turned into a statement. That suits a figure who has spent the whole day absorbed in watching. The tense adds a small tension: "this day" sounds immediate, while "I was" at the end is already past, so we seem to be hearing from the evening, when the day's looking has been tallied. The list is also telling. "The light" and "insects" sit side by side, with the "and" doing the work of a comma, as though a patch of brightness and a crawling beetle deserved the same quality of regard. The phrase "other creatures" then folds the insects into a family the speaker half belongs to.
The last two lines are where the poem turns. "To which I was not little" is a double negative in effect: a denial of smallness, a litotes, stated with a slightly formal "to which." We usually expect nature to make a person feel small, and the grand view of mountains and stars is a literary habit. Bonta reverses it. Next to insects, the speaker is enormous, a looming shape in their sky. Read alongside the title, that bigness is not entirely comfortable. To a creature of that size a human might be a landscape, a threat, or, if the speaker's hunger wins out, a predator. The phrase also leaves room for a gentler sense that the speaker was not insignificant to these creatures, because he was seen and counted among them. The poem does not choose between these readings, and the title's grim joke hangs over all of them.
The form is slight, but the shaping is careful. There is no rhyme and no steady meter. The lines run to roughly eight, three, seven, and five syllables, and the shrinking is expressive. "And insects" is a tiny line, small on the page like its subject. The longest line holds the sweeping, unhurried "looking at the light," and the poem then contracts toward its ending. Sound ties the frame together, because "light" at the end of the first line is answered by "little" at the very end. The two words share their opening consonant and short *i*, so the poem begins and ends in the same sonic neighborhood, even as it argues about scale. It is also notable that the poem finishes on "little," the very word it denies. Smallness is the last thing we hear, which suggests the speaker's size is felt only in contrast with it.
Part of the effect is a clash of registers. "Entomophagy" is a cool, scientific word, the language of a menu in a laboratory, and it sits in the title above lines made almost entirely of plain, short words. The title turns the speaker's hunger into a joke about the starving-artist cliché, while the poem itself stays quiet and observant. Together they suggest that the artist's way of looking is a kind of appetite, patient, close, and a little predatory, and that it has an uneasy kinship with literal hunger.
The poem is significant for how much it does in eighteen words. It takes a stock figure, the starving artist, and makes him strange. It also turns the old habit of feeling dwarfed by nature on its head, without lecturing and with very little comfort. What stays with the reader is the speaker's slightly guilty, slightly amused recognition that to the creatures he spent the day watching, he was never little at all.