The Patterns of the Monarch

There are many beautiful caterpillars, brightly colored or marvelously fuzzy, and the caterpillar of the Monarch butterfly is one. I spotted this brilliantly striped insect a couple of days ago, on the leaf of a milkweed plant, and was surprised to see one so late in the season. I watched it feed on the edge of a leaf, moving its mouth quickly down its edge – chomp, chomp, chomp – then up again, just like I eat an ear of corn. The pattern of movement also sent me back to the days of the manual typewriter: at the end of each line of type a "ka-ching" with the pressing of the return lever.




Nearby a monarch butterfly was hanging quietly from some grass, its wings closed. I assumed that it was newly hatched from its chrysalis and was drying its wings, but I might be wrong. Its bold patterning of orange and black, with white spots on body and wing edges, is eye-catching and unmistakable when we see them flying about. I find it fascinating that there is no relationship in color or type of pattern from the caterpillar to the butterfly, except that the caterpillar has small white spots on its little black legs, not visible in the photo above. The most remarkable pattern of this butterfly are its patterns of migration: spanning 3 or 4 generations, the monarchs migrate many hundreds of miles each year; our Northeastern Monarchs will journey all the way to Mexico during winter.

In the fragility of lovely butterflies, their floating through air, their metamorphic life cycles and short life spans, we find metaphor, as in Emily Dickinson's poem:

From cocoon forth a butterfly
As lady from her door
Emerged – a summer afternoon –
Repairing everywhere,

Without design, that I could trace,
Except to stray abroad
On miscellaneous enterprise
The clovers understood.

Her pretty parasol was seen
Contracting in a field
Where men made hay, then struggling hard
With an opposing cloud,

Where parties, phantom as herself,
To Nowhere seemed to go
In purposeless circumference,
As 't were a tropic show.

And notwithstanding bee that worked,
And flower that zealous blew,
This audience of idleness
Disdained them, from the sky,

Till sundown crept, a steady tide,
And men that made the hay,
And afternoon, and butterfly,
Extinguished in its sea.