Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967). Picture-Show. 1920.

20. Butterflies

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;

And theirs the faintest winds that hush the green.

And they are as my soul that wings its way

Out of the starlit dimness into morn:

And they are as my tremulous being—born

To know but this, the phantom glare of day.