From Cocoon forth a Butterfly
From Cocoon forth a Butterfly
Emily Dickinson seems to have anticipated the American craze for butterflies which would develop in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the Civil War. There might have been, in that coming vogue, something of the old folk belief that butterflies were souls of the departed, but if the enthusiasts for Lepidoptera thought sentimentally about the insects, they had a funny way of showing it, since butterflies were avidly killed and collected. Perhaps the transience of butterflies helped people to make sense of those years of bereavement - butterfly symbols were certainly used as memento mori in jewellery and lace in Victorian England - or perhaps the mere frivolity of the pursuit and capture of beauty was what people felt they needed. It might also have been that the metamorphoses in the butterflies’ life-cycles were seen as something symbolic in a nation that desperately needed to emerge from the oppressive chrysalis of the Civil War and the evils that caused it. Between 1868 and 1897, William H Edwards would gradually publish his magnum opus, The Butterflies of North America, with 152 hand-coloured lithographic plates, bringing European classificatory approaches to species which had not been studied systematically before.
The passion for collecting butterflies survived well into the twentieth century. My own father, living in Staffordshire, England, collected them avidly as a boy in the 1940s and 1950s, and he did so with such scientific fervour that the national press, in the form of The Daily Mirror, once visited his home to publish a feature article about him. The butterflies and moths still exist, in exquisitely carpentered cabinets made by my grandfather, and have been used as a scientific resource. Amongst the Blues and Browns, Peacocks and Painted Ladies, there are others considered fantastically rare by today’s standards: velvet-winged Camberwell Beauties, Purple Emperors, named because their upper wings flash an iridescent violet colour when viewed at a certain angle. Now, the ethical zeitgeist has changed, and such collecting is a thing of the past. Catching and killing some of the rarer butterflies can lead to a prison sentence. But of course, children collecting butterflies did not make them rare; modern industrial farming, synthetic insecticides and habitat destruction did. We recoil with horror at the stories of nineteenth century naturalists like Audobon, who shot the birds he painted, but it is our combine harvesters and pesticides that are causing extinctions. We are sure that it is wrong to kill a butterfly and stick a pin through it, but we don’t so easily remember that it is wrong to eat bread made out of grain protected by insecticides which killed a field-full of butterflies.
Emily Dickinson’s own obsession with butterflies began early - she was already invoking surreal visions of them in ‘A Bird, came down the Walk’ in 1862 - but it was not their rarity, their decorative qualities, or their role in the symbolism of death and transience that fascinated her, so much as the fact of their otherness. Butterflies fly, but not with the heavy wingbeats of large birds, the flutterings of songbirds, or with the frenetic wing-beats, too fast for the human eye, of the hummingbirds that visited her garden. Their flight is seemingly effortless. Their movements often seem aimless to the human eye, and once they are out of the chrysalis, they appear to do very little that can be described as “work”. Dung beetles trundle dung - a sometimes Herculean task. Flies are ceaselessly, fastidiously, washing and preening themselves. Moths relentlessly bother themselves with lamps and well-lit windows. Earwig mothers fuss over their eggs. Even grasshoppers put considerable effort into the business of gnawing, stridulating and hopping - so much so that one wonders why Aesop did not write a fable called ‘The Ant and the Butterfly’ instead of ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’.
All of this fascinated Dickinson, but there was one other aspect of the butterflies’ natural history which made them the ideal subject for her verse. “My business is circumference”, she once wrote in a letter, implying that whilst she might write about homely, mundane things, the business of her poetry was to imbue these observations with universal significance. This is, in fact, a regular structural feature of her poems: she starts with an observation of something humble, at the centre - a bird coming down the walk, a bee visiting a flower, a spider with a ball of silk - and finishes on another plane altogether, out on the circumference. A butterfly embodies this process. It begins as an egg, and then becomes a caterpillar, restricted to a particular food-plant: a life rooted to a very particular centre. It pupates, forms a chrysalis, and all of its body parts liquefy inside the external shell, before re-coalescing in a staggeringly different form - one which, when it emerges, can reach the circumference with a few easy wing-beats. And that is what a poet does: makes an observation, melts the words for it into the chrysalis of poetic form, and then hopes against hope that it will fly. Dickinson made this analogy repeatedly; it thrilled her so much. We will explore three delightful examples.
*
The first might be a versified form of one of those fables by Aesop, since it has more than a touch of the cautionary tale, or the story of Icarus.
“Two Butterflies went out at Noon
And waltzed opon a Farm
And then espied Circumference
And caught a ride with him -
Then lost themselves and found themselves
In eddies of the sun
Till Gravitation missed them -
And Both were wrecked in Noon -”
Dickinson was well-read on the subject of maritime exploration, so she would have known that it was easy to determine one’s latitude at noon, but somewhat harder to be certain of one’s longitude. The failure to correctly discern the latter had famously wrecked Admiral Cloudesley Shovell’s fleet on the Isles of Scilly in 1707 when he had thought he was just off the coast of Brittany, and had done for many smaller enterprises before and since. This nautical idea, perhaps with particular reference to the disastrous Franklin Expedition, was more explicit in an earlier version of the poem, which has the butterflies lost “Opon a shining Sea/ Though never yet, in any Port/ Their coming mentioned - be”. But perhaps Dickinson knew that butterflies could navigate - especially if they were Milkweed (or Monarch) butterflies, native to America and capable of migrations covering thousands of miles. They do this - it was discovered in 2016 - by monitoring the position of the sun with their compound eyes, and calibrating this against an internal clock located in their antennae. The species survives, of course, through profligacy of numbers, and the mortality rate is high - a strategy which means that the Milkweed butterfly may not endure the twenty-first century. In any case, Dickinson’s verbs capture their descent into haplessness: they “waltzed” to begin with, then they “caught a ride”, then they “lost themselves and found themselves”, and last of all, they were “wrecked”, apparently by flying out of the Earth’s gravitational field and being swept up, with mythological haplessness, into the sun.
The fable even has a moral, somewhat mocking in tone:
“To all surviving Butterflies
Be this Fatuity
Example - and monition
To entomology -”
That was written in 1863. She would take the plight of butterflies more seriously in future.
*
Later in the same year, she developed these ideas further into one of her most beautiful poems, but now the butterflies have lost their foolishness, and instead their sunward questing throws into question our human sense of purpose:
“From Cocoon forth a Butterfly
As Lady from her Door
Emerged - a Summer Afternoon -
Repairing Everywhere -
Without Design - that I could trace
Except to stray abroad
On miscellaneous Enterprise
The Clovers - understood -”
At first we think that the butterfly’s drift from centre to circumference, personified as a Lady going out for a walk with her parasol on a summer’s day, is going to be interpreted once again as the behaviour of a fundamentally frivolous creature, but there are already hints that entice an alternative reading. “Repairing Everywhere” might suggest that the butterfly is going everywhere, flying aimlessly - but we could also take “Repairing” in its more modern sense: wherever the butterfly goes, it fixes things, repairs our perceptions by putting our inflated sense of importance into context, or gratuitously heals a bit of our melancholy with a flash of joy. “Design”, too, is a word with a double meaning. The butterfly might be simply flying without purpose. It might equally be flying without obedience to any particular divinely ordained plan. Its beauty has evolved, not been created ex nihilo. The words after the dash qualify this statement: “Without Design - that I could trace”. The human observer cannot see the butterfly’s sense of purpose in its apparently aimless flittings, but the clovers are the direct beneficiaries of its movement, since they are pollinated by its visits.
We should pause to mention, too, that notion which was such a favourite of Emily Dickinson’s time: the idea of the “miscellaneous”. Middle class nineteenth century Europeans and Americans alike loved dabbling in the miscellaneous: pressing miscellaneous wildflowers, collecting miscellaneous butterflies, moths, egg shells or bird-skins - even publishing their scientific discoveries in the form of quite random miscellanies, a fascicle at a time, eventually to be bound into books. This butterfly, on its “miscellaneous Enterprise” is not so far from the spirit of American aesthetics, or American capitalism, after all - it is just that the things it rates as capital are very different from the things we value.
“Her pretty Parasol be seen
Contracting in a Field
Where Men made Hay -
Then struggling hard
With an opposing Cloud -
Where Parties - Phantom as Herself -
To Nowhere - seemed to go
In purposeless Circumference -
As ‘twere a Tropic Show -”
The middle portion of the poem, with its extended third verse, seems to be back on the Aesopian theme of labour and idleness again - as human beings struggle to make hay, the butterfly is flashing its wings in the field, and then engaging in a gargantuan struggle with a cloud. Originally, it was repairing everywhere, but now it is effectively going “nowhere” in particular. We might be tempted to conclude that the butterfly is putting on a performance purely to please its human observer, but those carefully-chosen words, “As ‘twere”, remind us again that it only seems purposeless - in fact, it knows precisely what it is doing, and none of it is for the benefit of human beings.
“And notwithstanding Bee - that worked -
And Flower - that zealous blew -
This Audience of Idleness
Disdained them, from the Sky -”
Suddenly, butterflies, and not human beings, are the audience, looking down on the labours of bees and haymakers alike. As we have already seen her do in ‘A Bird, came down the Walk’, Dickinson is pulling off that brilliant trick once more: exploding the poem’s perspective outward, from centre to circumference, from human observer to butterfly - and ultimately to a view more universal:
“Till Sundown crept - a steady Tide -
And Men that made the Hay -
And Afternoon - and Butterfly -
Extinguished - in the Sea -”
If we thought that the butterfly’s movements were inconsequential, we now discover that our own are too. Everything is drowned in circumference.
*
In 1865, Dickinson herself is at the centre, yearning to find a way out of the cocoon and into the circumference.
“My Cocoon tightens - Colors teaze -
I’m feeling for the Air -
A dim capacity of Wings
Demeans the Dress I wear -”
Those colours which we see on the butterfly’s wings must coalesce at some particular moment, out of the soup of being that is the deliquesced body of the caterpillar inside the chrysalis, because when the butterfly emerges, every scale on its four wings is already in place, even though the wings themselves hang like damp autumn leaves. The poet, stuck at the centre with an idea or an observation, but with only a “dim capacity” for perceiving how the poem itself will take flight, is already aware of being “teazed” by these colours. There are often protracted periods in the making of a poem when everything seems dormant. The poet’s own mind is an amorphous soup of possible metaphors, images, sibilances and alliterations, contained inside the drab crisp of the chrysalis. Often, a person watching a poet seemingly in the act of creation is surprised by how quickly a poem may be written down. This is analogous to the butterfly inflating its wings whilst hanging from the ruptured chrysalis, and flying away. But the truth is that all of the work was already done, inside the chrysalis, as the poet walked, gardened, slept, worked at something else, or simply stared into space. A poem is an imago with a whole life-cycle behind it. It flits in seemingly effortless magnificence, but it grew out of hard intellectual work, hunkered down at the centre.
“A power of Butterfly must be
The Aptitude to fly
Meadows of Majesty concedes
And easy Sweeps of Sky -
So I must baffle at the Hint
And cipher at the Sign
And make such blunder, if at last
I take the clue divine -”
The “Aptitude to fly” is latent in the dissolved caterpillar inside the chrysalis, and Dickinson knows that it is latent in her, too, as the words of a poem begin to coalesce. It has always been a source of fascination to me that the adult form of most butterfly species seems to be embossed on the outside of the chrysalis, even whilst the animal itself is still just jollop, as if the chrysalis anticipates that aptitude. A chrysalis may already bear the marks of the folded wings, the eyes, the thorax and abdomen, even the antennae and the tongue. This is analogous to poetic form: the sonnet, heroic couplets, the ballad metre, the villanelle. Poetic form is both the prison inside which the poet “baffles” with a half-formed poem, and the external mould which gives it shape and purpose. Perhaps, as its nervous system reconstitutes, the insect inside the pupa comes to a point of consciousness that it is imprisoned, like a fly in a jar, baffling its head against the lid, desperate to be free. Poets, too, must batter themselves against the life-giving constrictions of poetic form itself, as Dickinson is doing here. They are, by definition, striving for perfection, seeking to release an exquisite imago in verse, with not a wing-scale out of place, but they have only human tools: language, words, ciphers and (notice how Dickinson suddenly sounds like a twentieth century expert in semiotics!) signs. Poets must “baffle” and “blunder”, or they too will never break out of the chrysalis which formed their poem, and fly out to the circumference, and the sun.
On the matter of Dickinson and butterflies, there is one more thing left to say. She did not yet live in an age of mass-extinction, but we do. The Passenger Pigeon, which once swept across North America in enormous flocks, was in decline, but not manifestly endangered. The last one would be shot in 1901: humanity’s shot across the bows of abundance in the natural world. In the mid twentieth century, we narrowly avoided an insect apocalypse - not one of the locust plagues described in the Bible, but mass die-offs of pollinators due to the abuse of DDT and other synthetic insecticides - and a strong case can be made that is was an author, Rachel Carson, who turned public opinion against the destruction just in time, with her book, Silent Spring. But modern neonicotinoids, whilst reportedly not so toxic to the rest of the food-chain, continue to ravage our insect fauna: the pollinators which keep us alive, the decomposers which keep us from drowning in carcasses, and the butterflies which help to make life worth living. Herbicides get into our watercourses, and denude arable land of weeds which feed the insects. The Milkweed butterfly may be on a collision course with extinction, because it is running out of its larval food-plant - milkweed. One day, if we continue in this way, the last Milkweed caterpillar will search ever more weakly for the leaves for which its specialised digestive system will be craving, and will find none of them. Our insect populations are now in catastrophic decline. T.S. Eliot once used the image of an “insect sprawling on a pin” as a modernist re-imagining of the cruelty of crucifixion, but our far more all-embracing, existentially dreadful cruelty usually comes in a bottle with the name of a multinational pesticide company on its label.
Dickinson’s poems inspired by butterflies remind us that the flight from centre to circumference ultimately means extinction for all of us: we will die, we will be consumed by something bigger, all of our struggles, miniscule or Herculean, will become inconsequential. She knew that everything was ephemeral, even as she was in the act of giving us all the faith that poetry could touch something that was eternal. But we can be certain that she would have recoiled in horror had she known that we would waltz so cavalierly towards causing the eradication of insect life entirely by ourselves - life which has graced this planet for 480 million years. The collapse of insect life would mean the collapse of ecosystems, the collapse of agriculture, and therefore the collapse of human civilisation - a culmination which Dickinson certainly envisaged, but not in this way, which points so clearly to the “Fatuity”, not of butterflies, but of human beings. “Entomology” does not need a moralistic Aesop’s fable to keep it from oblivion; “anthropology” does.
Dickinson may not have foreseen this, but she does exemplify something else which could be very useful to us in our time of crisis. It is delight. Few poets express delight in the natural world with quite the economy and insight that Dickinson does, as she bids us watch with her as a pair of butterflies spirals upwards into the sun. The threat to our existence does not seem to stop us from killing insects. Rekindling the delight in insect lives and beauty might provide us with more of a motivation.
*
Science, too, can help us with that delight. This meditation has included some scientific facts about butterflies which Dickinson did not know. The fact that a caterpillar completely liquefies inside its chrysalis, for example, might have delighted her still more, and would assuredly have resulted in a poem. Other great American poets, like Robert Frost, express their doubts about the ability of science to help us with our existential problems. We should note in concluding that Dickinson does not, and it resounds to her credit. There are people alive in the world today who will not wear masks in an epidemic, who will deny that we are on the edge of a mass-extinction event, who will resort to the language of faith whilst denying that the fact that our ice-caps are melting could be a problem. There is a poem by Dickinson for them, too. I quote it in full:
“ “Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!”
For William H. Edwards's illustration of the Milkweed Butterfly, see:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/interne...
Emily Dickinson seems to have anticipated the American craze for butterflies which would develop in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the Civil War. There might have been, in that coming vogue, something of the old folk belief that butterflies were souls of the departed, but if the enthusiasts for Lepidoptera thought sentimentally about the insects, they had a funny way of showing it, since butterflies were avidly killed and collected. Perhaps the transience of butterflies helped people to make sense of those years of bereavement - butterfly symbols were certainly used as memento mori in jewellery and lace in Victorian England - or perhaps the mere frivolity of the pursuit and capture of beauty was what people felt they needed. It might also have been that the metamorphoses in the butterflies’ life-cycles were seen as something symbolic in a nation that desperately needed to emerge from the oppressive chrysalis of the Civil War and the evils that caused it. Between 1868 and 1897, William H Edwards would gradually publish his magnum opus, The Butterflies of North America, with 152 hand-coloured lithographic plates, bringing European classificatory approaches to species which had not been studied systematically before.
The passion for collecting butterflies survived well into the twentieth century. My own father, living in Staffordshire, England, collected them avidly as a boy in the 1940s and 1950s, and he did so with such scientific fervour that the national press, in the form of The Daily Mirror, once visited his home to publish a feature article about him. The butterflies and moths still exist, in exquisitely carpentered cabinets made by my grandfather, and have been used as a scientific resource. Amongst the Blues and Browns, Peacocks and Painted Ladies, there are others considered fantastically rare by today’s standards: velvet-winged Camberwell Beauties, Purple Emperors, named because their upper wings flash an iridescent violet colour when viewed at a certain angle. Now, the ethical zeitgeist has changed, and such collecting is a thing of the past. Catching and killing some of the rarer butterflies can lead to a prison sentence. But of course, children collecting butterflies did not make them rare; modern industrial farming, synthetic insecticides and habitat destruction did. We recoil with horror at the stories of nineteenth century naturalists like Audobon, who shot the birds he painted, but it is our combine harvesters and pesticides that are causing extinctions. We are sure that it is wrong to kill a butterfly and stick a pin through it, but we don’t so easily remember that it is wrong to eat bread made out of grain protected by insecticides which killed a field-full of butterflies.
Emily Dickinson’s own obsession with butterflies began early - she was already invoking surreal visions of them in ‘A Bird, came down the Walk’ in 1862 - but it was not their rarity, their decorative qualities, or their role in the symbolism of death and transience that fascinated her, so much as the fact of their otherness. Butterflies fly, but not with the heavy wingbeats of large birds, the flutterings of songbirds, or with the frenetic wing-beats, too fast for the human eye, of the hummingbirds that visited her garden. Their flight is seemingly effortless. Their movements often seem aimless to the human eye, and once they are out of the chrysalis, they appear to do very little that can be described as “work”. Dung beetles trundle dung - a sometimes Herculean task. Flies are ceaselessly, fastidiously, washing and preening themselves. Moths relentlessly bother themselves with lamps and well-lit windows. Earwig mothers fuss over their eggs. Even grasshoppers put considerable effort into the business of gnawing, stridulating and hopping - so much so that one wonders why Aesop did not write a fable called ‘The Ant and the Butterfly’ instead of ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’.
All of this fascinated Dickinson, but there was one other aspect of the butterflies’ natural history which made them the ideal subject for her verse. “My business is circumference”, she once wrote in a letter, implying that whilst she might write about homely, mundane things, the business of her poetry was to imbue these observations with universal significance. This is, in fact, a regular structural feature of her poems: she starts with an observation of something humble, at the centre - a bird coming down the walk, a bee visiting a flower, a spider with a ball of silk - and finishes on another plane altogether, out on the circumference. A butterfly embodies this process. It begins as an egg, and then becomes a caterpillar, restricted to a particular food-plant: a life rooted to a very particular centre. It pupates, forms a chrysalis, and all of its body parts liquefy inside the external shell, before re-coalescing in a staggeringly different form - one which, when it emerges, can reach the circumference with a few easy wing-beats. And that is what a poet does: makes an observation, melts the words for it into the chrysalis of poetic form, and then hopes against hope that it will fly. Dickinson made this analogy repeatedly; it thrilled her so much. We will explore three delightful examples.
*
The first might be a versified form of one of those fables by Aesop, since it has more than a touch of the cautionary tale, or the story of Icarus.
“Two Butterflies went out at Noon
And waltzed opon a Farm
And then espied Circumference
And caught a ride with him -
Then lost themselves and found themselves
In eddies of the sun
Till Gravitation missed them -
And Both were wrecked in Noon -”
Dickinson was well-read on the subject of maritime exploration, so she would have known that it was easy to determine one’s latitude at noon, but somewhat harder to be certain of one’s longitude. The failure to correctly discern the latter had famously wrecked Admiral Cloudesley Shovell’s fleet on the Isles of Scilly in 1707 when he had thought he was just off the coast of Brittany, and had done for many smaller enterprises before and since. This nautical idea, perhaps with particular reference to the disastrous Franklin Expedition, was more explicit in an earlier version of the poem, which has the butterflies lost “Opon a shining Sea/ Though never yet, in any Port/ Their coming mentioned - be”. But perhaps Dickinson knew that butterflies could navigate - especially if they were Milkweed (or Monarch) butterflies, native to America and capable of migrations covering thousands of miles. They do this - it was discovered in 2016 - by monitoring the position of the sun with their compound eyes, and calibrating this against an internal clock located in their antennae. The species survives, of course, through profligacy of numbers, and the mortality rate is high - a strategy which means that the Milkweed butterfly may not endure the twenty-first century. In any case, Dickinson’s verbs capture their descent into haplessness: they “waltzed” to begin with, then they “caught a ride”, then they “lost themselves and found themselves”, and last of all, they were “wrecked”, apparently by flying out of the Earth’s gravitational field and being swept up, with mythological haplessness, into the sun.
The fable even has a moral, somewhat mocking in tone:
“To all surviving Butterflies
Be this Fatuity
Example - and monition
To entomology -”
That was written in 1863. She would take the plight of butterflies more seriously in future.
*
Later in the same year, she developed these ideas further into one of her most beautiful poems, but now the butterflies have lost their foolishness, and instead their sunward questing throws into question our human sense of purpose:
“From Cocoon forth a Butterfly
As Lady from her Door
Emerged - a Summer Afternoon -
Repairing Everywhere -
Without Design - that I could trace
Except to stray abroad
On miscellaneous Enterprise
The Clovers - understood -”
At first we think that the butterfly’s drift from centre to circumference, personified as a Lady going out for a walk with her parasol on a summer’s day, is going to be interpreted once again as the behaviour of a fundamentally frivolous creature, but there are already hints that entice an alternative reading. “Repairing Everywhere” might suggest that the butterfly is going everywhere, flying aimlessly - but we could also take “Repairing” in its more modern sense: wherever the butterfly goes, it fixes things, repairs our perceptions by putting our inflated sense of importance into context, or gratuitously heals a bit of our melancholy with a flash of joy. “Design”, too, is a word with a double meaning. The butterfly might be simply flying without purpose. It might equally be flying without obedience to any particular divinely ordained plan. Its beauty has evolved, not been created ex nihilo. The words after the dash qualify this statement: “Without Design - that I could trace”. The human observer cannot see the butterfly’s sense of purpose in its apparently aimless flittings, but the clovers are the direct beneficiaries of its movement, since they are pollinated by its visits.
We should pause to mention, too, that notion which was such a favourite of Emily Dickinson’s time: the idea of the “miscellaneous”. Middle class nineteenth century Europeans and Americans alike loved dabbling in the miscellaneous: pressing miscellaneous wildflowers, collecting miscellaneous butterflies, moths, egg shells or bird-skins - even publishing their scientific discoveries in the form of quite random miscellanies, a fascicle at a time, eventually to be bound into books. This butterfly, on its “miscellaneous Enterprise” is not so far from the spirit of American aesthetics, or American capitalism, after all - it is just that the things it rates as capital are very different from the things we value.
“Her pretty Parasol be seen
Contracting in a Field
Where Men made Hay -
Then struggling hard
With an opposing Cloud -
Where Parties - Phantom as Herself -
To Nowhere - seemed to go
In purposeless Circumference -
As ‘twere a Tropic Show -”
The middle portion of the poem, with its extended third verse, seems to be back on the Aesopian theme of labour and idleness again - as human beings struggle to make hay, the butterfly is flashing its wings in the field, and then engaging in a gargantuan struggle with a cloud. Originally, it was repairing everywhere, but now it is effectively going “nowhere” in particular. We might be tempted to conclude that the butterfly is putting on a performance purely to please its human observer, but those carefully-chosen words, “As ‘twere”, remind us again that it only seems purposeless - in fact, it knows precisely what it is doing, and none of it is for the benefit of human beings.
“And notwithstanding Bee - that worked -
And Flower - that zealous blew -
This Audience of Idleness
Disdained them, from the Sky -”
Suddenly, butterflies, and not human beings, are the audience, looking down on the labours of bees and haymakers alike. As we have already seen her do in ‘A Bird, came down the Walk’, Dickinson is pulling off that brilliant trick once more: exploding the poem’s perspective outward, from centre to circumference, from human observer to butterfly - and ultimately to a view more universal:
“Till Sundown crept - a steady Tide -
And Men that made the Hay -
And Afternoon - and Butterfly -
Extinguished - in the Sea -”
If we thought that the butterfly’s movements were inconsequential, we now discover that our own are too. Everything is drowned in circumference.
*
In 1865, Dickinson herself is at the centre, yearning to find a way out of the cocoon and into the circumference.
“My Cocoon tightens - Colors teaze -
I’m feeling for the Air -
A dim capacity of Wings
Demeans the Dress I wear -”
Those colours which we see on the butterfly’s wings must coalesce at some particular moment, out of the soup of being that is the deliquesced body of the caterpillar inside the chrysalis, because when the butterfly emerges, every scale on its four wings is already in place, even though the wings themselves hang like damp autumn leaves. The poet, stuck at the centre with an idea or an observation, but with only a “dim capacity” for perceiving how the poem itself will take flight, is already aware of being “teazed” by these colours. There are often protracted periods in the making of a poem when everything seems dormant. The poet’s own mind is an amorphous soup of possible metaphors, images, sibilances and alliterations, contained inside the drab crisp of the chrysalis. Often, a person watching a poet seemingly in the act of creation is surprised by how quickly a poem may be written down. This is analogous to the butterfly inflating its wings whilst hanging from the ruptured chrysalis, and flying away. But the truth is that all of the work was already done, inside the chrysalis, as the poet walked, gardened, slept, worked at something else, or simply stared into space. A poem is an imago with a whole life-cycle behind it. It flits in seemingly effortless magnificence, but it grew out of hard intellectual work, hunkered down at the centre.
“A power of Butterfly must be
The Aptitude to fly
Meadows of Majesty concedes
And easy Sweeps of Sky -
So I must baffle at the Hint
And cipher at the Sign
And make such blunder, if at last
I take the clue divine -”
The “Aptitude to fly” is latent in the dissolved caterpillar inside the chrysalis, and Dickinson knows that it is latent in her, too, as the words of a poem begin to coalesce. It has always been a source of fascination to me that the adult form of most butterfly species seems to be embossed on the outside of the chrysalis, even whilst the animal itself is still just jollop, as if the chrysalis anticipates that aptitude. A chrysalis may already bear the marks of the folded wings, the eyes, the thorax and abdomen, even the antennae and the tongue. This is analogous to poetic form: the sonnet, heroic couplets, the ballad metre, the villanelle. Poetic form is both the prison inside which the poet “baffles” with a half-formed poem, and the external mould which gives it shape and purpose. Perhaps, as its nervous system reconstitutes, the insect inside the pupa comes to a point of consciousness that it is imprisoned, like a fly in a jar, baffling its head against the lid, desperate to be free. Poets, too, must batter themselves against the life-giving constrictions of poetic form itself, as Dickinson is doing here. They are, by definition, striving for perfection, seeking to release an exquisite imago in verse, with not a wing-scale out of place, but they have only human tools: language, words, ciphers and (notice how Dickinson suddenly sounds like a twentieth century expert in semiotics!) signs. Poets must “baffle” and “blunder”, or they too will never break out of the chrysalis which formed their poem, and fly out to the circumference, and the sun.
On the matter of Dickinson and butterflies, there is one more thing left to say. She did not yet live in an age of mass-extinction, but we do. The Passenger Pigeon, which once swept across North America in enormous flocks, was in decline, but not manifestly endangered. The last one would be shot in 1901: humanity’s shot across the bows of abundance in the natural world. In the mid twentieth century, we narrowly avoided an insect apocalypse - not one of the locust plagues described in the Bible, but mass die-offs of pollinators due to the abuse of DDT and other synthetic insecticides - and a strong case can be made that is was an author, Rachel Carson, who turned public opinion against the destruction just in time, with her book, Silent Spring. But modern neonicotinoids, whilst reportedly not so toxic to the rest of the food-chain, continue to ravage our insect fauna: the pollinators which keep us alive, the decomposers which keep us from drowning in carcasses, and the butterflies which help to make life worth living. Herbicides get into our watercourses, and denude arable land of weeds which feed the insects. The Milkweed butterfly may be on a collision course with extinction, because it is running out of its larval food-plant - milkweed. One day, if we continue in this way, the last Milkweed caterpillar will search ever more weakly for the leaves for which its specialised digestive system will be craving, and will find none of them. Our insect populations are now in catastrophic decline. T.S. Eliot once used the image of an “insect sprawling on a pin” as a modernist re-imagining of the cruelty of crucifixion, but our far more all-embracing, existentially dreadful cruelty usually comes in a bottle with the name of a multinational pesticide company on its label.
Dickinson’s poems inspired by butterflies remind us that the flight from centre to circumference ultimately means extinction for all of us: we will die, we will be consumed by something bigger, all of our struggles, miniscule or Herculean, will become inconsequential. She knew that everything was ephemeral, even as she was in the act of giving us all the faith that poetry could touch something that was eternal. But we can be certain that she would have recoiled in horror had she known that we would waltz so cavalierly towards causing the eradication of insect life entirely by ourselves - life which has graced this planet for 480 million years. The collapse of insect life would mean the collapse of ecosystems, the collapse of agriculture, and therefore the collapse of human civilisation - a culmination which Dickinson certainly envisaged, but not in this way, which points so clearly to the “Fatuity”, not of butterflies, but of human beings. “Entomology” does not need a moralistic Aesop’s fable to keep it from oblivion; “anthropology” does.
Dickinson may not have foreseen this, but she does exemplify something else which could be very useful to us in our time of crisis. It is delight. Few poets express delight in the natural world with quite the economy and insight that Dickinson does, as she bids us watch with her as a pair of butterflies spirals upwards into the sun. The threat to our existence does not seem to stop us from killing insects. Rekindling the delight in insect lives and beauty might provide us with more of a motivation.
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Science, too, can help us with that delight. This meditation has included some scientific facts about butterflies which Dickinson did not know. The fact that a caterpillar completely liquefies inside its chrysalis, for example, might have delighted her still more, and would assuredly have resulted in a poem. Other great American poets, like Robert Frost, express their doubts about the ability of science to help us with our existential problems. We should note in concluding that Dickinson does not, and it resounds to her credit. There are people alive in the world today who will not wear masks in an epidemic, who will deny that we are on the edge of a mass-extinction event, who will resort to the language of faith whilst denying that the fact that our ice-caps are melting could be a problem. There is a poem by Dickinson for them, too. I quote it in full:
“ “Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!”
For William H. Edwards's illustration of the Milkweed Butterfly, see:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/interne...
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