Irving Layton's “Butterfly on Rock” and “The Fertile Muck” concern themselves primarily with the same issue. In “The Fertile Muck,” the speaker asks “How to dominate reality?” (25); in “Butterfly on Rock,” the poet contemplates the “desire/to be a thing alive” (7-8). In both pieces, that is, Layton ponders how to bring significance to mere existence. He explicitly provides two answers - “Love is one way;/imagination another” (25-26) – and the latter of these he brings to the forefront and focus of each of these poems.
In “Butterfly on Rock,” Layton explores the concept of the creative artist through the metaphor of a butterfly which settles on a rock, thereby making “manifest” (8) the lifeless object's yearning. He employs this metaphor, as well, in “The Fertile Muck,” where he describes insects as having a poet's “crafty eyes” (8). The image of the butterfly is evocative. Butterflies connote beauty and fancifulness – qualities which may be attributed to the artist or his craft – but, above all, they represent transformation. Layton suggests, then, that imagination is transformative; it has the power to “extend...rooms...without cost” (“The Fertile Muck” 19) – to transform, and transcend, what is.
Layton is, however, not content with settling on this earthy, delicate representation of the poet. In “The Fertile Muck,” for example, though “the winged insects...wear [his] crafty eyes” (7-8), they are no “better off” (7) than the empty wind. Perhaps butterflies are simply too common for Layton, too much a part of the “bleak forest” (“Butterfly on Rock” 10) he desires to escape. Layton does not see the butterfly as the ideal image of the poet because it is fragile; it can be destroyed or confined in “moth-proofed cupboards” (“Fertile” 17), its “irregular footprint” (“Fertile” 22) erased.
Being thus discontent with the fragility connoted by the butterfly, Layton elevates the poet further, to the status of a god. For instance, in “Butterfly on Rock,” it is not until the speaker most epically brings his “hand down on the butterfly” (14) that the rock actually comes alive, so to speak; it is the poet's hand which achieves the miraculous. In “The Fertile Muck,” Layton writes,
There are brightest apples on those trees
but until I, fabulist, have spoken
they do not know their significance
or what other legends are hung...
on their black boughs. (1-5)
The image of the tree and its legendary fruit is allusive: it brings to mind, for instance, the golden apples of Greek mythology, or the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. By putting his speaker in the position of the “fabulist” (2) then, Layton not only conveys that a poet is a mythmaker in a dual sense. The poet is a creator, an artist, drawing from the “fertile muck” of his mind and surroundings, and, like the religious Creator, he makes life meaningful.
While Layton, then, associates himself as an artist with the butterfly, evidently he is not satisfied with a purely natural symbol. In both of the poems in question, he chooses to represent his poetic expression as Godlike. He shows staunch - indeed, almost arrogant - conviction in the power of the creative artist - but perhaps Layton in his time, unlike the Romantic poets in theirs, though he is inspired by it, simply feels no complete reassurance in or by nature. Nature is death, “shattered porcupines...in [a] bleak forest” (“Butterfly” 9-10). To feel secure in his vocation - to bring significance to his art and thereby his own existence - Layton must, as he does, envision the poet - himself - as indestructible, Godlike.
WORKS CITED
Layton, Irving. “Butterfly on Rock.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Eds. Donna Bennet and Russel Brown. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 512. Print.
---. “The Fertile Muck.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Eds. Donna Bennet and Russel Brown. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 508-509. Print.
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