The poem begins by letting something go. "Oh let the humid air lift your wings / sweet butterfly / into the summer sunshine!" The speaker does not catch or pin the insect. They step back and give it permission to rise. Everything after that reads as a consequence of the release. By the last line the butterfly has vanished, and what is left is "a blaze of sudden flowers / at play upon my tongue", which is to say a poem being spoken. The butterfly seems to stand for inspiration, or for language in its lightest, least controlled state.
The middle of the poem moves from open sky into a hidden valley, where "spreading birches... conceal wonders / of poetry and industry." The pairing is interesting. Industry suggests labour and the daily discipline of writing, and it sits beside the airier word "poetry" as if the two shared a hiding place. Then come "the white blank pages / full of silence." Birches have pale bark, so judging by the imagery, trees and paper seem to blur together. The landscape becomes a page, and the page becomes something to climb: "scale the slopes with trembling / fingertips." The line break leaves "fingertips" alone on its line, so the hesitation is built into the layout. "Scale" may also carry a second meaning, since butterfly wings are covered in scales. That is a possible echo rather than a certain one, but it fits a poem so absorbed in its insect.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The stanzas are uneven, and lines range from a single word-group to a long breath. The slashes inside the text ("industry / the white blank pages", "fingertips / a hushed knowing") work like pauses that never quite close the sentence. The reader hovers from phrase to phrase without settling, much as a butterfly does. Without rhyme, sound does the binding through repeated consonants, above all the soft *s*: "summer sunshine", "slopes", "silence", "scale", "secrets", "scents". The sibilance is itself a hush, so the sound matches the "hushed knowing" the poem names.
That phrase ends with "of you alone", and the "you" is deliberately slippery. It could be the butterfly, a beloved, a muse, or the reader. The poem never says, and the openness seems part of its design. Whoever "you" is, the knowledge is private, passed on without noise.
The third stanza is where the poem's own language begins to loosen. "Through the hold the light breaks the thought / and the rules of language / flitter away." There is no punctuation, and "hold" might mean a grip, an enclosure, or a pause. The sentence can be parsed in more than one way, so the grammar slackens at the very moment it describes grammar's rules disappearing. The verb "flitter" is also a butterfly's verb. The movement that began in the sky has now moved into syntax, and the insect has become the way the poem behaves.
The ending is the most physical moment. Scents ("the summer scents") turn into flowers that blaze, and the flowers turn out to be on the speaker's tongue. Smell, sight and taste merge into speech, and the poem comes to rest in the mouth, where words are actually made. After all the wings, valleys and slopes, the inspiration lands in the body.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it enacts its idea instead of only stating it. Its claim is that writing comes less from gripping language than from opening the hand. The loosening grammar, the drifting slashes and the shift from sky to tongue all let the reader feel that happen. It also asks for slow reading. A reader who insists on one tidy meaning for "hold" or "you" will miss what the poem is doing, which is to flit just out of reach and leave something sweet behind.