'A Dark Vanessa With Crimson Band'

The first stanza of C.H. Sisson’s “The Red Admiral” (Exactions, 1980): 

“The wings tremble, it is the red admiral

Ecstatically against the garden wall;

September is his enjoyment, but he does not know it,

Name it, or refer to it at all.”

 

When I was collecting butterflies as a boy, the Red Admiral was my favorite after the mourning cloak. The beauty of each is less gaudy, more complex than many other species. I always thought the orangish-red pattern on the wings resembled the outline of a gaping human mouth or a partially erased circle. The species was described by Linnaeus in 1758 and is known to lepidopterists as Vanessa atalanta. It is widely distributed among the world’s temperate zones. Sisson, no scientist, is right. Butterflies are often most active in late summer – a sort of lepidopteran last hurrah -- but I have seen no red admirals in our garden this year, only monarchs and various fritillaries and swallowtails.

 

In his marvelous The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband, 2025), Nigel Andrew describes the surprising origin of the butterfly’s Latin name:

 

“Vanessa is a name that sounds as if it has been around for ever – the kind of name that might be found in Latin love poetry – but it was in fact invented by the poet and satirist Jonathan Swift as a pet name for Esther Vanhomrigh, the unfortunate young woman, twenty-two years his junior, who was the object of his obsessive love for seventeen years, until he moved on to another Esther (Esther Johnson, nicknamed Stella).”

 

Swift arrived at “Vanessa” by conflating the “Van” of “Vanhomrigh” with “Esse,” a pet form of Esther. Soon after Swift published his poem "Cadenus and Vanesa" (written 1713; published 1726), the Danish naturalist Fabricius named the butterfly’s genus Vanessa. Nige tells us “Atalanta” was a figure in Greek mythology, “a formidable virgin huntress and athlete who was notably reluctant to marry." Handel titled his 1736 pastoral opera Atalanta.

 

Nabokov took to calling the butterfly Red Admirable “(Admiral, in vulgar parlance).” No other species shows up so often in the lepidopterist/novelist’s work. In his novel Pale Fire, in the poem that gives the novel its name, the poet John Shade, likens his wife, Sybil, to the butterfly:

 

“Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed,

My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest

My Admirable butterfly!”

 

In the poem’s final lines, Shade is looking for his wife moments before his death:

 

“A dark Vanessa with crimson band

Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand

And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.

And through the flowing shade and ebbing light

A man, unheedful of the butterfly -

Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by

Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.” 

 

Nige notes that Nabokov believed “Admiral” was a corruption of “Admirable,” but the opposite is likely true: “‘Admiral’ was the earliest recorded name,” he writes, “‘Admirable’ a later version that gained little currency except with those who, reasonably enough, liked the sound of it.” I never encountered “Admirable” until reading Nabokov.

 

Here is the final stanza of Sisson’s poem:

 

“Its fingers lighter than spiders, the red admiral

Considers, as I do, with little movement;

With little of anything that is meant:

But let the meaning go, movement is all.”