Emily Dickinson's six-line butterfly can survive the sun but not the heat
In six lines, Emily Dickinson dresses a butterfly in a gown scorched with dark spots, declares it safe from the Sun, and then shows it folding its wings and slumping onto a clover as if it had collapsed. The joke is gentle, and the observation is exact.
The poem turns on a contradiction. Its opening half is all splendour: the insect wears a gown with an exotic name, marked with patches of burnish that have been roasted on, and it is described as proof against the Sun. The wording sounds like a tailor or a metalworker boasting about a finish. Then the second half deflates the boast. The same creature is inclined to close its spotted fan and lean, panting, on a clover, looking for all the world "As if it were undone". Armour against sunlight, it turns out, is not the same as stamina in summer heat.
Much of the pleasure lies in the domestic comparisons. A gown and a fan belong to a drawing room, not a meadow, so the butterfly becomes a lady overcome at a garden party. Yet the details are those of a close watcher of real insects, which rest with wings shut and cling to flowers on hot days. Dickinson makes the scene comic without mocking it, and the dashes at the ends of lines leave the collapse hanging.
That blend of fashion vocabulary and field observation fits what is known of her schooling. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, she spent seven years at Amherst Academy, a former boys' school that had admitted girls only two years before she and her sister Lavinia enrolled in 1840. Her subjects ran from Latin and history to botany and geology. The principal, Daniel Taggart Fiske, remembered her as an outstanding pupil, even though illness kept her away for stretches, including 1845 to 1846, when she attended for just eleven weeks.
Nature and mortality are the two great subjects of her nearly 1,800 poems, and this small one touches both: the butterfly's glory and its fragility sit side by side. The terse lines and lean description here are typical of the style later readers came to treat as groundbreaking.
Source: The Butterfly's Numidian Gown
