Having written about rock in the last Poster Poems, I thought it might be interesting to move on to something a little less permanent this time around, and so I lit on the idea of poems about butterflies.
These fragile insects have always been popular with poets, and given the widespread adoption in popular culture of quantum theory's much-misunderstood butterfly effect, it seems likely that they will continue to feature in poems into the foreseeable future. Mind you, if Edward Lorenz was right, the butterfly effect means that the future isn't particularly foreseeable.
According to Lorenz, small changes in the initial conditions of a system make it difficult to predict the system's final state. In James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota", a sleeping butterfly is the initial condition for a poem that leads to the conclusion that the poet has wasted his life; it's a poem of deceptive simplicity and when you read the last line you are inclined to go back and read it again to find out quite how you got to that particular final state.
In Hilda Morley's "The Dust Covers My Shoes", the butterfly does not appear until the end of the poem, where it stands as a symbol of all those frail individuals who are voiceless and powerless in the face of the loss of humanity in societies in which the rule of law has broken down. It is a victim of chaos, not its agent.
If Morley's butterflies are ground down by life, Emily Dickinson, in a poem called "The butterfly obtains", prefers to see them as dissolute idlers, lacking the reputation for industriousness that might make them seem more worthy of "Immortality". It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that Dickinson is with the butterflies.
A blue butterfly is the object of a kind of quest in "The Search for Lost Lives" by James Tate, even though the poet acknowledges that he does not want to catch his quarry. If Tate's blue butterfly is more symbol than insect, those that inhabit Robert Frost's "Blue-butterfly Day" are as real, colourful and frail as you could ask for. And yet they sing, all but.
The butterflies in Ezra Pound's (or should that be Li Po's) "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" are not blue, but an autumnal yellow. Colour, season, and the butterfly's brief life expectancy cluster around the image of "paired butterflies" to remind the wife both of her separation from her husband and of her own mortality.
Li Po's well-known poem "Chuang Tzu and the Butterfly" more or less brings me full circle. The blurring of the boundaries between dream and waking, butterfly and philosopher, returns us to a world in which the future is never certain: "who can tell the end of the endless changes of things?"
And yet I cannot but hope that you will "toil and toil" to produce poems as delicate and powerful as butterflies this month, and when you do that you don't pin them in some glass case in your private collection, but bring them here to share with your fellow lepidoperists of verse. Get those nets out, time to go hunting across the fields of your imaginations and bring back fleeting treasures.
