Butterflies
Butterflies - meaning Summary
Childhood, Pain, and Transformation
The poem shows children chasing butterflies, injuring themselves in the pursuit. Their father calms them and points out that caterpillars and eggs on cabbage leaves become butterflies, linking beauty to a grubby, necessary process. The closing speaker rejects a simplistic division of heaven as beautiful and earth as ugly, warning that denying the messy origins of transformation — the slug, the worm — condemns spiritual life to death.
Read Complete AnalysesEyes aloft, over dangerous places, The children follow the butterflies, And, in the sweat of their upturned faces, Slash with a net at the empty skies. So it goes they fall amid brambles, And sting their toes on the nettle-tops, Till, after a thousand scratches and scrambles, They wipe their brows and the hunting stops. Then to quiet them comes their father And stills the riot of pain and grief, Saying, "Little ones, go and gather Out of my garden a cabbage-leaf. "You will find on it whorls and clots of Dull grey eggs that, properly fed, Turn, by way of the worm, to lots of Glorious butterflies raised from the dead." . . . "Heaven is beautiful, Earth is ugly," The three-dimensioned preacher saith; So we must not look where the snail and the slug lie For Psyche's birth. . . . And that is our death!
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