Thou winged blossom! liberated thing!
What secret tie binds thee to other flowers
Still held within the garden’s fostering?
Will they too soar with the completed hours,
Take flight and be like thee
Irrevocably free,
Hovering at will o’er their parental bowers?
—“Ode to a Butterfly,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson
The butterfly has long served as a shorthand way of communicating change and growth. The transformative nature of how a caterpillar emerges from a cocoon as a physically different being, now with antennae and wings and totally different colors, has become a symbol in a variety of genres. Think of the play M. Butterfly, and how author David Henry Hwang raises questions about gender performance and sexual desire.