Picture Show (Sassoon collection)/Butterflies

by Siegfried Sassoon

For works with similar titles, see Butterflies.

BUTTERFLIES

 

Frail travellers, deftly flickering over the flowers;O living flowers against the heedless blueOf summer days, what sends them dancing throughThis fiery-blossom'd revel of the hours?

Theirs are the musing silences betweenThe enraptured crying of shrill birds that makeHeaven in the wood while summer dawns awake;And theirs the faintest winds that hush the green.

And they are as my soul that wings its wayOut of the starlit dimness into morn:And they are as my tremulous being—bornTo know but this, the phantom glare of day.