Butterflies

Sun-child, as you watched the rain

Beat the pane,

Saw the garden of your dreams

Where the clove carnation grows

And the rose

Veiled with shimmering shades and gleams,

Mirrored colours, mystic gleams,

Fairy dreams,

Drifting in your radiant eyes

Half in earnest asked, that day,

Half in play,

Where were all the butterflies?

Where were all the butterflies

When the skies

Clouded and their bowers of clover

Bowed beneath the golden shower?

Every flower

Shook and the rose was brimming over.

Ah, the dog-rose trembling over

Thyme and clover,

How it glitters in the sun,

Now the hare-bells lift again

Bright with rain

After all the showers are done!

See, when all the showers are done,

How the sun

Softly smiling o'er the scene

Bids the white wings come and go

To and fro

Through the maze of gold and green.

Magic webs of gold and green

Rainbow sheen

Mesh the maze of flower and fern,

Cuckoo-grass and meadow-sweet,

And the wheat

Where the crimson poppies burn.

Ay; and where the poppies burn,

They return

All across the dreamy downs,

Little wings that flutter and beat

O'er the sweet

Bluffs the purple clover crowns.

Where the fairy clover crowns

Dreamy downs,

And amidst the golden grass

Buttercups and daisies blow

To and fro

When the shadowy billows pass;

Time has watched them pause and pass

Where Love was;

Ah, what fairy butterflies,

Little wild incarnate blisses,

Coloured kisses,

Floating under azure skies!

Under those eternal skies

See, they rise:

Mottled wings of moony sheen,

Wings in whitest star-shine dipped,

Orange tipped,

Eyed with black and veined with green.

They were the fairies plumed with green

Rainbow-sheen

Ere Time bade their host begone

From that palace built of roses

Which still dozes

In the greenwood all alone.

In the greenwood all alone

And unknown:

Now they roam these mortal dells

Wondering where that happy glade is,

Painted ladies,

Admirals, and Tortoise-shells.

O, Fritillaries, Admirals,

Tortoise-shells;

You, like fragments of the skies

Fringed with Autumn's richest hues,

Dainty blues

Patterned with mosaic dyes;

Oh, and you whose peacock dyes

Gleam with eyes;

You, whose wings of burnished copper

Burn upon the sunburnt brae

Where all day

Whirrs the hot and grey grasshopper;

While the grey grasshopper whirrs

In the furze,

You that with your sulphur wings

Melt into the gold perfume

Of the broom

Where the linnet sits and sings;

You that, as a poet sings,

On your wings

Image forth the dreams of earth,

Quickening them in form and hue

To the new

Glory of a brighter birth;

You that bring to a brighter birth

Dust and earth,

Rapt to glory on your wings,

All transfigured in the white

Living light

Shed from out the soul of things;

Heralds of the soul of things,

You whose wings

Carry heaven through every glade;

Thus transfigured from the petals

Death unsettles,

Little souls of leaf and blade;

You that mimic bud and blade;

Light and shade;

Tinted souls of leaf and stone,

Flower and sunny bank of sand,

Fairyland

Calls her children to their own;

Calls them back into their own

Great unknown;

Where the harmonies they cull

On their wings are made complete

As they beat

Through the Gate called Beautiful.