20. Butterflies. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1920. Picture-Show

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	5
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:	10
And they are as my tremulous being—born
To know but this, the phantom glare of day.