The Curious Symbolism of Butterflies in Literature and Myth

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Throughout various cultures and in numerous literary and mythological traditions, the butterfly represents life. In a range of ways, butterflies symbolise the life spirit, long life, or even the ability to be reborn.

This last one needn’t surprise us when we stop to observe that a butterfly is a beautiful insect which emerges from a chrysalis. But because it lives only a short while before fluttering away into the sunset, the butterfly is also sometimes used as a symbol for the fleeting nature of life.

Hans Biedermann notes in his informative Wordsworth Dictionary of Symbolism that images of butterflies used to adorn old tombstones, because the insects symbolised the transformations undergone by our own souls. So butterflies often represent metamorphosis and transformation, too.

Etymology

Why are butterflies so named? It’s actually something of a mystery. The Oxford English Dictionary vacillates, calling the motivation for the name ‘unclear’ and positing that the word may have been a reference to the pale yellow appearance of the wings of certain European butterflies (the famous brimstone butterfly being one prominent example).

Alternatively, though, the OED also proposes that the name may have arisen because of the butterfly’s supposed tendency to feed on butter or buttermilk, or even from some curious folk belief that butterflies steal butter. Indeed, one regional Dutch term for the insect, botterheks, literally means ‘butter witch’, implying that people at one stage believed butterflies to be witches who had assumed insect form.

Since the sixteenth century, the term ‘night-butterfly’ has occasionally been used to apply to moths.

In myth

In the Irish myth of the Courtship of Etain, Midir’s second wife is turned into a puddle of water because Midir’s first wife is jealous of her. Shortly after this, a worm emerges from the puddle, and transforms into a beautiful butterfly.

In European paintings, Psyche – the goddess of the soul – is often depicted with the wings of a butterfly, since the word ‘psyche’ is the ancient Greek for ‘soul’ and the Greeks believed that the soul took the form of a butterfly when it fled from the body. Indeed, wall paintings in the destroyed city of Pompeii show Psyche as a little girl with the wings of a butterfly.

So in ancient Greek, psyche meant both ‘soul’ and ‘butterfly’: a telling double meaning. Of course, this Greek root also gave us all manner of ‘psych-’ words related to the mind (the modern-day, rational secular equivalent of the soul), from ‘psychology’ to ‘psychosis’ to ‘psychoanalysis’ and everything else.

In poetry

The Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō (1644-94) wrote a memorable haiku, ‘A Caterpillar’, which encapsulates the life-cycle of the butterfly:

A caterpillar,
this deep in fall –
still not a butterfly.

In Japanese culture, indeed, the butterfly has long symbolised marital happiness, depicted specifically with two butterflies dancing around one another.

In English poetry, the Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) did the most to make the case for a deep-rooted connection between the poet and the butterfly. Writing to his would-be sweetheart, Fanny Brawne, Keats sighed, ‘I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days – three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.’

However, his fellow Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) liked butterflies so much that he composed not one but two poems about them. Neither is among his classic poems (Wordsworth wrote much that was not inspired, when he wasn’t penning ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ and ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’), but they’re still of interest to the poetry fan.

The better of the two poems was composed on 20 April 1802, and sees the poet addressing the butterfly as it remains motionless on top of a yellow flower until the breeze ‘calls’ it ‘forth’ once more:

I’ve watched you now a full half-hour;
Self-poised upon that yellow flower
And, little Butterfly! indeed
I know not if you sleep or feed.

Before Wordsworth, Keats, and the Romantics, the Augustan or neoclassical Alexander Pope (1688-1744) – one of the most quotable poets in all of English literature – gave us a memorable phrase involving butterflies: in his ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, Pope coined the phrase ‘break a butterfly upon a wheel’ to refer to needlessly forceful destruction of something delicate.

Indeed, Pope’s phrase also indirectly played a part in the first recorded use of the phrase ‘social butterfly’, referring to someone who flits from one social engagement to another: when the phrase made its (presumed) debut in print in the American Quarterly Review in 1837, it was in the sentence, ‘He has too much goodness of heart to engage in the breaking of social butterflies upon the wheel of ridicule.’

The American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-86) also wrote several poems about butterflies. In one of these, she describes a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, idly emerging into the summer afternoon like a lady of leisure stepping out of her front door:

From cocoon forth a butterfly
As lady from her door
Emerged – a summer afternoon –
Repairing everywhere …

However, as the poem develops, we realise that the butterfly’s idleness is just a sham: it is hard at work, pollinating the flowers, just as the bees will take that pollen and produce honey from it.

In fiction

The American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 short story ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ has a curious claim to fame: it’s thought to be the first short story to contain a robotic insect.

Owen Warland makes watches, but he becomes side-tracked by a secret project which consumes his time and attention. He loves Annie, but she is encouraged to marry Robert, a practical-minded blacksmith. Owen achieves his ambition to create something beautiful: a tiny clockwork butterfly, which he presents to Annie as a belated wedding present.

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov was a keen butterfly-collector or lepidopterist, to give this hobby/profession its official title. He wrote his most famous novel, Lolita, while he was on the butterfly-collection trips in the western U.S. which he undertook every summer. Nabokov even had a ‘genitalia cabinet’ in which he kept his collection of male blue butterfly genitalia. It’s now housed at Harvard.