Butterflies

by Siegfried Sassoon (1920) — a poem card from Justes Mots

A lyric meditation on butterflies as symbols of the soul's delicate, fleeting journey through daylight. Written with musical precision, Sassoon celebrates nature's transient beauty and the speaker's own ephemeral being, evoking wonder at existence itself.

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

Theirs are the musing silences between
The enraptured crying of shrill birds that make
Heaven in the wood while summer dawns awake;…

Themes: love · new-baby · wedding · friendship