To a Butterfly: Named After Its Discoverer a Young Scientist Now Dead of Wounds

IN the old shadows and old mists of time
When, casting off their crusts of mire,
The continents heaved from the seas’ dark slime,
You and your race brought sparks of fire
To earth’s unbroken gray.
Though none were there to tell,
You held your fragile way
While tribes of armored monsters rose and fell
And man stole from the forests you had lighted,
Shivering, hairless, in a world of doom,
Just saved by glints of thought and, though affrighted,
Sustained by love’s faint bloom.

He, of all primates the most prying,
Listed your kin as ages passed,
But you yourself in secret still were flying
Till, in a year when boys were dying,
A boy saw you at last:
In a quick glance saw all your marks and shading,
Saw them with instant microscopic eye;
His notebook speaks, in lines already fading,
Didactically of you, a butterfly.
But under the severe pedantic phrasing
We feel a waking fire, no less,
The first lines of a poet praising
The loved one’s shining dress.

Now he lies buried on a coral atoll,
This poet of your gold and green and blue
Dead from an hour of ship-consuming battle
Such as no past age knew.
For the weak primate has become the master
Of fire and steel and speed and earth’s most hidden prizes,
Monarch of all, except perpetual disaster
Which he himself devises,
Which he himself builds up, intent and aimless.
Heaping the obtuse and the savage high,
Then claiming the protection of the blameless
From an impassive sky.

So, while we watch our tall boys going
Toward near horizons, rimmed with bursts of flame,
We give them only platitudes, well knowing
That what they give still leaves the world the same
Unless the desolate who knew them
Can find the truth they now could teach,
Learned from the guns that spoke death to them
And high explosives’ speech,
Can salvage truth for earth’s appalled survivors,
Dredging a point of light from sick despair
And black primordial depths, as divers
With bursting lungs bring pearls up to air.

But if the loss is total in their dying,
If, for us, what they say turns out to be
As empty as the sea-gulls’ crying
Above an empty sea,
Then we shall doubtless make an end to sorrow
And joy and to our beaten souls, at last,
And for this ball of earth, tomorrow
Will be the same as the blank distant past
When, through millenniums of silence,
Your flight in time’s dark womb
Gave an effect of gay, light, charming violence,
Making delight — for whom?