D.H. Lawrence wrote 'The Mosquito' in 1921 during his time in the Lago di Garda region of Italy, including it in his collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923). The poem is a ferocious meditation on the intimate antagonism between a man and a mosquito — the creature's sucking of blood becomes an occasion for Lawrence's characteristically charged reflections on desire, predation, violation, and the dark life-force. It is one of the most electrically observed insect poems in the English language.

Lawrence's 'The Mosquito' is a landmark in the tradition of parasite poetry, extending it from the comic and moral registers of Donne and Burns into the territory of existential confrontation. Lawrence's engagement with the mosquito as a blood-drinking other — genuinely threatening yet also vitally alive — anticipates the ecological and phenomenological poetry of the later twentieth century. The poem demonstrates how the mosquito had become, by the early twentieth century, a creature dense enough with medical and symbolic significance to sustain an entire philosophical lyric.