Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967). Picture-Show. 1920.
20. Butterflies
F
O living flowers against the heedless blue
Of summer days, what sends them dancing through
This fiery-blossom’d revel of the hours?
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.
Out of the starlit dimness into morn:
And they are as my tremulous being—born
To know but this, the phantom glare of day.