If there's one thing I love almost as much (perhaps even more) than a blue flower, it's a blue butterfly: from the smallest of small blues to the largest of large blues, and including the common blue, holly blue and the brilliant Adonis blue, I find them all extraordinarily beautiful to behold (even if only ever seen in photographs).
I think my favourite, however, is the silver-studded blue (Plebejus argus), found gaily dancing amongst the heather during the long summer months and befriending the black ants that protect their eggs and larval young. Although the females are far less splendid than the male - blueness giving way to a drab brown colour - they do retain the distinct silver spots on their hindwings.
Of course, numbers of both sexes have undergone a major decline during recent decades across most of its (restricted) range in the UK, thanks to all the usual causes; habitat loss, agricultural practice, landscape development, etc.
Of course, numbers of both sexes have undergone a major decline during recent decades across most of its (restricted) range in the UK, thanks to all the usual causes; habitat loss, agricultural practice, landscape development, etc.
This, to me at least, is a genuinely depressing fact. I really don't think I would want to live in a world without blue butterflies, blue flowers, blue birds, and what Lawrence terms the blueness of the Greater Day that, in a sense, these things embody and symbolise, existing as they do beyond the everyday beauty of things that belong solely to the yellow sun.
See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Flying-Fish', Appendix II, St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
For a sister post on the blue flower, click here.
For a sister post on the blue flower, click here.
As Patrick Kurp has observed in a congenial blog entry concerning blue animals, Henry David Thoreau and the poetry of Louise Bogan,
ReplyDelete'Blue is rare in nature, especially at non-tropical latitudes, but shows up in fish, birds, amphibians, butterflies and other insects. Mammals, as a rule, are dowdier creatures. Louise Bogan noticed this irregular color distribution in a poem she wrote in 1936, “Variation on a Sentence” (The Blue Estuaries, 1968):
Of white and tawny, black as ink,
Yellow, and undefined, and pink,
And piebald, there are droves I think.
(Buff kine in herd, gray whales in pod,
Brown woodchucks, colored like the sod,
All creatures from the hand of God.)
And many of a hellish hue;
But, for some reason hard to view,
Earth’s bluish animals are few.
Bogan’s biographer, Elizabeth Frank, tells us she based the poem on Thoreau’s Feb. 21, 1855 journal entry: “How plain, wholesome, and earthy are the colors of quadrupeds generally! The commonest I should say is the tawny or various shades of brown, answering to the russet which is the prevailing color of the earth’s surface, perhaps, and to the yellow of sands beneath. The darker brown mingled with this answers to the darker-colored soil of the surface. The white of the polar bear, ermine weasel, etc., answers to the snow; the spots of the pards, perchance, to the earth spotted with flowers or tinted leaves of autumn; the black, perhaps, to night, and muddy bottoms and dark waters. There are few or no bluish animals.”'
Thoreau wasn’t the first to notice protective coloration among animals, though he is writing four years before the publication of On the Origin of Species. We have blue jays, the noisiest birds in Houston. I occasionally find an explosion of their feathers on the lawn when one has been grabbed and torn apart by an owl or hawk, but “bluish” birds of any species are otherwise rare. Did my son and I share a hallucination? Or were our feeble senses merely being kind to us, compensating for some absence?'
I also feel grateful for how the lovely silver-studded butterfly of which Stephen writes fleetingly continues to embody the poetic necessity of blue, and see it as an evanescent manifestation of melancholy soul in the world (for the Greeks, 'psyche' also meant 'butterfly').
Thanks for this S - particularly liked the little verse by Louise Bogan.
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