The Frosted Butterfly

Life lives, life dies. Life laughs, life cries. Life gives up and life tries. But life looks different through everyone's eyes. -Anonymous

One of my all time favorite poets would have to be Robert Frost and so I figured that I would pick one of his poems to discuss this week. It is a surprise that I haven’t picked one of his poems before because he just has so many excellent poems to select from. Now I will admit I was tempted to do “The Road Not Taken” because it is my all time favorite poem but I decided to stretch myself and pick a poem of his that I had not read before. This poem “My Butterfly” really caught my interest because it was one of Robert Frost’s first poems. Robert Frost uses an excellent voice in this poem seemingly very smooth and educated for only being nineteen when it was written. The speaker talks about the winter coming and how this butterfly has been gone or dead due to the winter’s harsh landscape. Even though the butterfly is no more at the beginning of the poem Frost speaks about the beauty of its careless wings and show deep, loving emotions toward it. It could be said that the butterfly actually represents a person that Frost cared for, who was likely to have been very care-free in life. The speaker talks more about the time he had with the butterfly and how he remembers it so dear flying with the winds above and gliding on its light wings. ‘It seemed God let thee flutter from his gentle clasp: then fearful he had let thee win too far beyond him to be gathered in, snatched thee, o'ereager, with ungentle gasp,’ is the unique and out of the ordinary way Frost described the death of this butterfly. The fascinating imagery does not end in this one portion of the poem; in fact, if you read the poem aloud and close your eyes you get this wonderful imagination of this butterfly depicted inside your head that it almost overwhelms you with sadness to realize that it is dead. Frost goes on to describe the time spent with the butterfly during warmer times such as spring or summer. Actually in my opinion the seasons in this poem actually describe the emotions of the time rather than the weather; in winter Frost seems to describe the coldness of the time as if he truly means the sadness, death and loneliness and in spring the speaker seems to talk of warmth or possibly happier, more loved times. The poem ends with this realization that in fact the butterfly is dead and the speaker is upset once again about how his loved butterfly is surely dead. :’(

http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=121