An Explication of To a Butterfly

Stay near me - do not take thy flight!

Thou bring'st, gay creature as thou art!

Oh! Pleasant, pleasant were the days,

The time, when in our childish plays,

Upon the prey; - with leaps and springs

But she, God love her! feared to brush

In Wordsworth's poetry, two themes emerge as predominate. The first is that of nature. The second is his idea that "The Child is father of the Man." In To A Butterfly, these themes meet. The result is a poem showing how, for the poet, the experience of nature is intimately associated with the experience of childhood.

The dramatic progression of the poem is simple. The speaker, observing a butterfly, is drawn back to the joys of his childhood and a memory of playing outside with his sister, chasing after butterflies. This type of associat

In line four the butterfly becomes a "Historian of my infancy!" The butterfly not only has revived certain lasting memories, but is able to somehow synthesize these memories, bringing back what was most poignant or most important. In line five, again we hear a kind of begging and desperate tone the poet is taking, like as if he couldn't bear loose the intensity of the moment. There is a sort of magic in the experience the poet is having, the times of his infancy, long since past, are said to have been brought back to life, not literally of course, but "revive(d)" metaphorically in the body of the butterfly.

So at the end of the poem we have come full circle. We begin with Wordsworth the man observing a butterfly and being taken back to the memories of his childhood. We drift through these memories, glimpsing the Wordsworth of his youth, and by the end of the poem are made to realize how in many ways the child in Wordsworth is still alive. Yet as a man, the means of expression for the joys he feels in experiencing nature have changed. We come to the end of the poem, and in doing so have experienced ourselves the product of this change: the poem itself.

In line eight Wordsworth uses the word solemn to describe the image that is brought to his heart. I was a little confused by the use of this word, as it immediately brought to mind somber and gloomy images, images converse to the feelings he previously described. However, taken in the context of the poem, I believe there is room for all of the word's meanings. The primary meaning of somber I think would be awe-inspiring or sublime. This reading of the word is backed by the previous line where he refers to the butterfly as a "gay creature." The sense of the word mean

Some common words found in the essay are:
Oh Pleasant, Butterfly Stay, meaning converse, wordsworth sister, sister emmeline, gay creature, meaning somber, infancy butterfly, somber gloomy, memories childhood, leaps springs, solemn image,
Approximate Word count = 1174
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)