Tag: butterfly

This audience of idleness

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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.

Her pretty parasol was 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 ’t were a tropic show.

And notwithstanding bee that worked,
And flower that zealous blew,
This audience of idleness
Disdained them, from the sky,

Till sundown crept, a steady tide,
And men that made the hay,
And afternoon, and butterfly,
Extinguished in its sea.

~Emily Dickinson

Dickinson here articulates perfectly the air that butterflies give off. While everything around them is purposeful, bursting and growing and hunting and prowling and photosynthesizing and raising babies, butterflies are just fluttering around. They appear so purposeless in their beauty that they are not even active enough to be idleness itself–they’re simply the “audience of idleness.” They’re spectating idleness rather than participating in it, so idle are they.

Dickinson describes the apparent aimlessness of butterflies wonderfully. They fly “without design,” “miscellaneous enterprise,” communing with “phantom” parties in a “purposeless circumference.”

Of course butterflies are doing something. They just look like they’re not. In the process, though, they are a reminder to slow down, to take the long, fluttering route, to savor each drop of every sweet summer day before it vanishes into the sea of night, into the onset of autumn, and the distant memory of winter.

Butterfly-carts and bee-wagons

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A little road not made of man,
Enabled of the eye,
Accessible to thill of bee,
Or cart of butterfly.

If town it have, beyond itself,
’T is that I cannot say;
I only sigh,—no vehicle
Bears me along that way.

~Emily Dickinson

I too can only sigh. It seems Emily was often wondering what it would be like to experience the world as its tinier denizens do. This road is doubly inaccessible because it is little and not made for humans, and is also a road through the air. It is for butterflies’ carts and bees’ wagons. (I had to look up “thill.”)

The notion of butterflies and bees pulling little carts is amusing. Or are they driving them? What on earth would insects do with carts? The idea that this road is for vehicles I find quite bemusing. Dickinson must have been in a whimsical mood when she penned this one.

Baronial bees!

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Some rainbow coming from the fair!
Some vision of the World Cashmere
I confidently see!
Or else a peacock’s purple train,
Feather by feather, on the plain
Fritters itself away!

The dreamy butterflies bestir,
Lethargic pools resume the whir
Of last year’s sundered tune.
From some old fortress on the sun
Baronial bees march, one by one,
In murmuring platoon!

The robins stand as thick to-day
As flakes of snow stood yesterday,
On fence and roof and twig.
The orchis binds her feather on
For her old lover, Don the Sun,
Revisiting the bog!

Without commander, countless, still,
The regiment of wood and hill
In bright detachment stand.
Behold! Whose multitudes are these?
The children of whose turbaned seas,
Or what Circassian land?

~Emily Dickinson

There’s much to love about this poem. In my edition, it’s titled “Summer’s Armies,” which I really like. It seems fitting. So many armies–hordes and throngs of birds, insects, blossoms, marching on into eternity, felled cyclically but always resurrected.

And the “baronial bees,” of course. The image is amusing to anyone who’s ever spent even a few minutes bee-watching. Never have I ever seen bees march one by one. Order they have in spades, but not in any way we think of it, and certainly not in a single-file way. There is a beautiful order to a hive, to its comings and goings, but on a warm day, to the human eye a bustling hive looks at first like sheer chaos. It’s an airport where no one appears to be performing air traffic control. Bees are everywhere. They clot the air, zoom in for crazy landings, twist and squiggle their ways around each other. Yet they know exactly what they’re doing, and nobody crashes into anybody or anything else.

They are a murmuring platoon, though. There are few lovelier sounds than their soft constant hymn to the sun.

No notice was to me…

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Two Butterflies went out at Noon—
And waltzed above a Farm—
Then stepped straight through the Firmament
And rested on a Beam—


And then—together bore away
Upon a shining Sea—
Though never yet, in any Port—
Their coming mentioned—be—


If spoken by the distant Bird—
If met in Ether Sea
By Frigate, or by Merchantman—
No notice—was—to me—

~Emily dickinson

Butterfly season has begun. The little pale-violet moths appeared first, their color scarcely a whisper above white. Next, a larger orange and black-veined butterfly, and then a black one with shimmering blue spots. How ephemeral they are, how delicate–the wind or a small bird’s beak can destroy them. Yet they persist, somehow, eternal despite their fragility. Their coming feels momentous as the arrival of a queen after winter’s frigid dry air and short days. When they disappear into an impossibly blue sky, are they ever really gone, or do they transcend all of it, this warming spring day, this greening field, this world perched forever on the brinks of seasons?

Prompt: From the Chrysalis

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MY cocoon tightens, colors tease,
I’m feeling for the air;
A dim capacity for wings
Degrades the dress I wear.

A power of a 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 clew divine.

Emily Dickinson

Today’s poem is written from the perspective of a butterfly that is still unhatched inside its chrysalis. What kind of other living things could you personify as they are aware of the world around them, but not part of it yet? Baby robins inside eggs? Roses unfurled from their buds?

The Grass

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THE grass so little has to do,–
A sphere of simple green,
With only butterflies to brood,
And bees to entertain,

And stir all day to pretty tunes
The breezes fetch along,
And hold the sunshine in its lap
And bow to everything;

And thread the dews all night, like pearls,
And make itself so fine,–
A duchess were too common
For such a noticing.

And even when it dies, to pass
In odors so divine,
As lowly spices gone to sleep,
Or amulets of pine.

And then to dwell in sovereign barns,
And dream the days away,–
The grass so little has to do,
I wish I were a hay!

Emily Dickinson

I keep expecting these things to be unrelatable, given the hundred and fiftyish years between us and our poet, and the poems keep on scratching right at my particular itch for the day. Perhaps that’s why Dickinson has remained relevant so long: we can continue to read ourselves, easily, into her poems.

I can imagine the speaker now, looking at the grass after a long, hard day, and thinking, ‘You know, it must be great to just have to be a blade of grass.’ I’ve had that kind of day. The one that starts with a raging thunderstorm as you’re driving to work, and continues with forgetting the textbook for your 8 am class, and crescendoes to the part where you have 20 or so research paper rough drafts to critique and not enough hours in the day. Oh, and remember when you promised to build a fort with your daughter and play pirates? Good, because she hasn’t forgotten. Find somewhere to fit that in between dance practice, dinner, and breathing.

I’m not quite ready to be a hay just yet, but I can definitely see the appeal.

A lot of questions about: Cocoon

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DRAB habitation of whom?
Tabernacle or tomb,
Or dome of worm,
Or porch of gnome,
Or some elf’s catacomb?

Emily Dickinson

While this is a short poem, it’s absolutely full of questions. First of all: who in the world lives in this little cocoon? We aren’t given any context clues; we don’t know what flower or branch might be holding the thing, or what color it is; we aren’t sure of the season, either. But the speaker isn’t done with questions.

“Tabernacle or tomb”: is this a place of religion–reverence, life–or is it a place of death? Put plainly, is a butterfly going to come out of this chrysalis, or has it already exited? Is it lying dead in its self-made coffin, unknown to us?

“Or dome of worm”: is the worm not yet turned into a butterfly? Have we happened on the site too early to have witnessed any change? Or are we talking about the worm here in the Shakespearean sense, as that little worker between body and burial?

“Or porch of gnome, / Or some elf’s catacomb?”: is this something entirely supernatural? And if so, is it a porch–the place where something might currently be living–or a burial ground?

Is this poem about life, or death? And what is a cocoon, anyway? Sure, the caterpillar lives on as a butterfly, but the caterpillar self is dead (as is the cocoon dead organic matter after the butterfly escapes). What’s left of the original thing? Is the cocoon a reminder of the new life that’s about to begin, or of the old one–or the second death the caterpillar will experience when the butterfly, too, dies?

Prompt: The butterfly’s assumption-gown

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The butterfly’s assumption-gown,

In chrysoprase apartments hung,

This afternoon put on.

How condescending to descend,

And be of buttercups the friend

In a New England town!

In six lines, this poem marvels at the beauty of something pretty mundane: a new butterfly among the buttercups. How do we know the butterfly is new? She’s wearing an assumption-gown, which is likely a reference to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven (per the Catholic church). This final robe of Mary would be a likely counterpart to the final “clothing” of a butterfly who has shed its chrysalis (chrysoprase, incidentally, is green, like that of a butterfly chrysalis). How beautiful, then, the final form of the butterfly; how absurdly normal a place for it to be, in the flowers in an ordinary town.

How can we find otherwordly beauty in the regular world around us?

Your challenge: clothe an ordinary object (living, breathing, or otherwise) in an extraordinary adornment. Kitten wearing mittens? Rock with a sock? Plush Darth Vader wearing a tiara? It’s up to you! Take a picture, write a poem, come up with a story idea, or just tell us what you’re imagining.