Mourning Cloak

I collected butterflies and moths for many summers as a kid, with varying degrees of seriousness, and I’m certain the attraction was more aesthetic than scientific, though the distinction remains fuzzy. Monarchs and viceroys both are beautiful but the latter’s mimicry of the former is adaptation at the highest level of aesthetic accomplishment.

I can name with certainty my favorite butterfly, in part because its attraction is rooted in another sort of mimicry – the pun. For a long time I mistook the mourning cloak (Nymphalis antiopa) for the “morning cloak.” In the morning I would take my net and follow a path along a ridge that paralleled the creek behind our house. The path was narrow and densely shaded. At the elbow where it turned to the northwest was a room-sized clearing among the oaks, wild cherries, poplars and black locust. If the sun shone, the mourning cloak fluttered about in the light, 10 or 12 feet off the ground, making him difficult to capture. I have never seen a more beautiful creature – purple-black wingtops with bright yellow piping at the outer edges. In the purple-black but near the yellow ribbon runs a line of iridescent blue spots. It’s a sublime combination of colors that, in clothing or home decoration, would look hideous. This hybrid of unlikely beauty, elusiveness and mistaken, evocative name insures I remain partial to the mourning cloak, and ought to make it inviting for poets and other writers.

According to Nabokov scholars, the mourning cloak shows up clandestinely in Pale Fire and perhaps elsewhere. I note that in England, the morning cloak is known as the Camberwell beauty, a name it shares with a 1974 collection of stories by V.S. Pritchett. In Iconographs, her 1970 book of “word-pictures” – poems arranged typographically to resemble the object they describe – May Swenson devotes “Unconscious Came a Beauty” to the mourning cloak. It’s not a good poem and hardly looks like a butterfly, but the first lines have charm: “Unconscious/came a beauty to my/wrist/and stopped my pencil,/merged its shadow profile with/my hand’s ghost…”

I found another poem, “Mourning Cloak,” in Joan Murray’s Looking for the Parade, but it too is dull and prosy. It goes on for more than two pages, but here’s the beginning, which captures the butterfly’s attraction to warmth and light:

“Because there was light
On the east side of the barn this morning,
The mourning cloak keeps beating himself
On the fixed panes of the window.”

In the March 2003 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Christina Pugh published “Mourning Cloak,” with the butterfly’s Latin name as subtitle:

“How it burdens, under glass:
the gray shingles of the wings
pressed from flight, slate
or wood grain
once thinned to buoyancy
when this butterfly
peppered streams,
its cloak hemmed
in near glint, grief
worn as lightness,
its crape wild
in the open air
between two sleeps.”

I return to Cleveland to visit my brother and his family later this week. The clearing where I chased the mourning cloak years ago grew shaded with tall trees, and is no longer a clearing and no longer a sanctuary for the butterfly.