We know what butterflies are but why do so many writers fill their pages with them? Let’s make sure we have something interesting to say about that butterfly image when we come across it!

ACTIVITY 1
What ideas do we associate with the butterfly? What do we know about them? What words would we associate with the butterfly? Brainstorm your ideas. Use the two videos below to prompt some thoughts.
Watch the videos below. Jot down your answers to the questions I’m going to ask you along the way!
ACTIVITY 2
i) When The Smashing Pumpkins’ singer Billy Corgan suggests he feels like a ‘Bullet With Butterfly Wings’ (see video below), what he is trying to tell us about how he is feeling? (The image is particular to the title; it doesn’t get mentioned in the lyrics).
ii) Knowing what we do about butterflies, why might the butterfly in the Screaming Trees song (see video below) cry?
iii) The Cure remind us that before the butterfly, there’s a caterpillar? How does this knowledge inform our reading of the butterfly? How does the butterfly feel?
iv) f we as people are – metaphorically speaking – flying “on butterfly wings” what are Boston Manor trying to suggest about the human condition? How should we, as people, feel about our “butterfly wings”?
v) Why is this Muse song called ‘Butterflies & Hurricanes’? What do the lyrics suggest about the human condition? Why is the butterfly image effective?
ACTIVITY 3
Examine the butterfly image in each of the texts quoted below. Why does each writer makes use of the butterfly symbol? What are they trying to suggest about their characters, the events taking place, the feelings involved etc.?
i) Margaret Atwood, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
The blue one is in the middle, the two red ones on either side, though the colors are no longer as bright; they seem to have faded, grown dingy, like dead butterflies or tropical fish drying on land. The gloss is off them. We stand and look at them in silence. “Let that be a reminder to us,” says the new Ofglen finally.
ii) Owen Sheers, ‘Four Movements in the Scale of Two’
Opposing bass clefs,
the elegant scars on the hips of a cello,
a butterfly’s white wings, resting.
iii) Tennessee Williams, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’
Blanche: ‘I never was hard or self-sufficient enough. When people are soft–soft people have got to
shimmer and glow–they’ve got to put on soft colors, the colors of butterfly wings, and put a–
paper lantern over the light…. It isn’t enough to be soft. You’ve got to be soft and attractive. And
I–I’m fading now! I don’t know how much longer I can turn the trick.’
iv) Seamus Heaney, ‘Death Of A Naturalist’
There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks.
Homepage image by Andy Ford.