Two Butterflies Went out at Noon

 Emily Dickinson uses  metaphors and themes to paint a perfect picture of two butterflies in her poem “Two Butterflies went out at Noon”.  

Picture a butterfly flying around a farm. It never flies in a perfectly straight line. When two butterflies are together they bob and duck around each other. This is the picture that Emily Dickinson was describing when she said

“Two butterflies went out at noon,

and waltzed above a farm-”

She got you to picture that in your head using only one sentence, when it took me three. This is the power of a perfectly worded metaphor. It is much more powerful because it also gives movement to the picture, now it might be a memory of a butterfly you are thinking of, rather than just a static picture.  The use of metaphors is what makes this poem special.

Emily used another metaphor to describe how the (still waltzing) butterflies flew up into the sky.

“Then stepped straight through the firmament”
The firmament is the vault of heaven (or sky). Butterflies don’t have feet, and if they did, they still couldn’t step into the sky. Saying it this way though, gives the poem a dream-like feeling. The fluidity of this line stood out to me. The word choice was perfect for this poem, first using “stepped” works with the waltzing metaphor, and the word firmament implies that they are stepping into heaven, making the waltzing butterflies seem like angels, floating up to the sky.

Through the whole poem she uses the theme of dreaminess. They start in the beginning dancing together and then later they leave together.

“And then—together bore away
Upon a shining Sea—  
Though never yet, in any Port—  
Their coming mentioned—be—”

Implying that our sweet little butterfly friends might be in love, perhaps eloping, leaving to the sea. It’s everyone’s dream to fall in love, run away and go live on the sea.  The thing that makes it interesting and even more dream like is that she says “though never yet, in anyport their coming mentioned be” as if this never happened, just like a dream.

In the final stanza, she ends the piece in a way open to interpretation.

“If spoken by the distant Bird—
 If met in Ether Sea
          By Frigate, or by Merchantman—
           No notice—was—to me—”

This strategy leaves you thinking about the poem through your day. I found myself daydreaming a little about where the delicate butterflies went, and what happened to them. No one knows, or even notices what happens next.
The whimsical spirit of this poem is beautiful and happy, but the unknown fate of the butterflies is melancholy and mysterious. In the beginning of the poem they were just butterflies, and now they are just a dream.