In "Virgil's Gnat," like its (non-Virgilian) source material, a sleeping shepherd is threatened by a snake; a gnat awakes him and the shepherd thoughtlessly squashes it. Realizing and regretting his mistake, he then builds the gnat a tiny but noble tomb!!!!

I've always loved Virgil's Gnat, which shares a wonderful trope with a lot of other short Renaissance lyric: the fancy bug tomb! It's a trope that celebrates the power of the small and the insignificant and suggests that building permanent memorials to such things is a worthy activity

There's a great argument that I think....Victoria Moul (?) makes about this, which is that the bug tombs scattered across early modern lyric are a defense of the work that lyric poetry does by memorializing the everyday (in distinction to epic, with its obviously important, big national stories).

Victoria Rimell**** getting my Latin poetry Victorias mixed up!

Compare "The Amber Bead" by Herrick I saw a fly within a bead Of amber cleanly burièd: The urn was little, but the room More rich than Cleopatra's tomb.

Another Herrick, "Upon a Flie". Perhaps unsurprising that he loved this trope; to quote Rosalie Colie, Herrick is "supremely a poet of the little"