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Note on Trogonoptera Brookiana

Same style as in Nip Out, times ten. The glue has hardened to metal. The scraps chink. My own feel for it, but then I’m biased, is that its descent, though Langland, Skelton, Ben Jonson, Browning, Hopkins, needs no defence, though I know many prefer a lighter music. To me, once it gets going, this ditty skips along as lightly as Haydn. It’s a map of chirping colour. You might think that the tropical butterfly (I have a specimen in my study from the butterfly farm in Syon Park) gets a bit lost. But it’s there all the time. It sips from a goblet and doesn’t like the flavour. It mocks our colonial taste and style. Colonial? Not post-colonial? It’s like this. I believe the British psyche is still unconsciously rigged out in the jumble of empire. Half the map is still pink, or should be, and it’s not just nostalgia. It’s a Boy’s Own ripple, and too stupidly glorious to be the dream property of an older and old-fashioned class, this debilitation that deserves its sundowner on the veranda. History doesn’t die quickly. The caped, velvety creature reproves us. But let’s not forget that the culture that luxuriated in the trappings of the British Raj also sent men and women on Darwinian missions to dissect and catalogue the world’s species. What else were we doing but completing Adam’s work and naming the animals? Hubris deserves nemesis, which is what the butterfly represents. Yet we think we can dissect our nemesis, too. Clever lot.

Alan Marshfield

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