Start with the title, because it does half the poem's work. "Butterlie" is "butterfly" with one letter changed, and that swap holds the whole conflict. A butterfly stands for lightness and flight, while a lie is something heavy you have to carry. The word may also hint at "buttering up," since flattery is the smoothest kind of lie, though that is my reading rather than anything the poem says outright.
The opening and closing refrain is a plea: "Butterfly won't you lie with me. / Butterfly won't you fly with me." Because lie and fly rhyme, the two requests sound like one thought, yet they pull in opposite directions. To lie can mean to rest beside someone or to say something false, and to fly means to get away. The speaker asks for closeness and for escape in the same breath. Notice, too, that the poem has no question marks. The pleas end in full stops, so "won't you" sounds less like a question than a chant, a spell repeated in the hope that it will work. Lines one and three are identical, as are two and four, so the stanza beats back and forth like wings.
The middle section breaks this rhythm with three short lines, each beginning with a contradicting "But": "he lies so dangerously," "she flies so courageously," "they cry so contagiously." The verbs are the refrain's own rhyme words, now conjugated, with a third, *cry*, joining them. Each verb gets its own judgment. Lying is dangerous, flying is brave, and crying is catching. The pronouns widen too, from one man to one woman to a crowd, as if private behaviour were spreading into something shared. The poem never explains why *he* lies and *she* flies, but the pattern invites us to wonder what the speaker has seen and why the butterfly is being asked to choose.
The adverbs matter as much as the verbs. "Dangerously," "courageously" and "contagiously" all end in the same sound, and they are long, rolling words that stretch each line well past the length of the refrain's. They have an odd comic edge as well. "Contagiously" is a clinical, almost medical word, and applying it to crying makes tears sound like an infection. The singsong rhyme starts to feel slightly out of control, like a nursery rhyme that has caught a fever.
Then comes the poem's turning point: "Why do I scream outrageous things." Two details stand out. First, this is the only line that abandons the lie/fly/cry rhyme. It keeps a faint echo of the adverbs in "outrageous," but the pattern has cracked. Second, the speaker finally appears as a grammatical subject. Until now the speaker was only "me," the object of the butterfly's possible attention. Now "I" acts, and the action is screaming. The missing question mark returns here with more force, because the question sounds like self-accusation, with no answer expected. What the "outrageous things" are is left open. They could be the earlier accusations, or the pleas themselves, since asking a butterfly to lie down and fly away together is a wild thing to ask.
When the refrain returns unchanged, it reads differently. The words are the same, but after the scream they sound more desperate, perhaps compulsive, like someone who cannot stop asking. The butterfly never answers. The poem ends where it began, and that circle suggests the speaker is stuck.
What makes "Butterlie" worth reading is how much it does with so little. Its vocabulary is plain and its form is almost a playground chant, yet the sound patterns carry the argument. Because lie, fly and cry rhyme, honesty, freedom and grief seem tangled together beyond any easy separation. The sweetness of the rhyme also sits uneasily against the scream, and that gap between tune and turmoil is what lingers after the last line. For students, it shows that repetition can be meaning rather than filler, since each return of the refrain asks the same question with a heavier heart.