Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was more than a novelist, poet, and translator. An avid lepidopterist, he also was the first to discovery and describe the Plebejus Melissa samuelis, also known as the Karner Blue butterfly. Nabokov found the butterfly in the Albany Pine Bush, between Albany and Schenectady, near a town named Karner, New York. The following poem was written by Nabokov in 1943, first appearing in the New Yorker under the title "On Discovering a Butterfly".
A Discovery
by Vladimir Nabokov
I found it in a legendary land
all rocks and lavender and tufted grass,
where it was settled on some sodden sand
hard by the torrent of a mountain pass.
The features it combines mark it as new
to science: shape and shade--the special tinge,
akin to moonlight, tempering its blue,
the dingy underside, the checquered fringe.
My needles have teased out its sculptured sex;
corroded tissues could no longer hide
that priceless mote now dimpling the convex
and limpid teardrop on a lighted slide.
Smoothly a screw is turned; out of the mist
two ambered hooks symmetrically slope,
or scales like battledores of amethyst
cross the charmed circle of the microscope.
I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer--and I want no other fame.
Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we leep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.
A Discovery
by Vladimir Nabokov
I found it in a legendary land
all rocks and lavender and tufted grass,
where it was settled on some sodden sand
hard by the torrent of a mountain pass.
The features it combines mark it as new
to science: shape and shade--the special tinge,
akin to moonlight, tempering its blue,
the dingy underside, the checquered fringe.
My needles have teased out its sculptured sex;
corroded tissues could no longer hide
that priceless mote now dimpling the convex
and limpid teardrop on a lighted slide.
Smoothly a screw is turned; out of the mist
two ambered hooks symmetrically slope,
or scales like battledores of amethyst
cross the charmed circle of the microscope.
I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer--and I want no other fame.
Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we leep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.
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