‘The Ballad of Sir Anopheles’, The Bulletin, 18 June 1908

The hero of this poem, as the name Sir Anopheles hints, is a mosquito. The author here humorously stages an encounter between man and mosquito as a drawn-out battle between a recumbent Ogre and an intrepid and undaunted medieval knight. It is clear from the start that the tiny knight has the mastery; indeed as the night-long battle progresses, the final result is inevitable, and the sullen Ogre’s defeat is a foregone conclusion:

So all night long the battle goes,
Until the vanquished ogre sinks
Exhausted and the sharp lance drinks
His blood [...]