"A Discovery"

A few years ago, a friend gave this poem to me before leaving for Thanksgiving break. He tore the page from a book, and beneath the poem he wrote, "A Weird Fact: My favorite Kind of butterflies are the kind with black and yellow spots. What's your favorite kind of butterfly?" and below that he wrote, "**Also included: A neat white rock I found a while ago that I use as a paperweight if the mooood (with an arrow pointing to a drawing of a cow) should strike". 

I still have the shimmering white rock but I haven't seen or heard from this friend ever since. Here is the poem, written by Nabokov, titled "A Discovery":

 

I found it in a legendary land
all rocks and lavender and tufted grass,
where it was settled on some sodden sand
hard by the torrent of a mountain pass.

The features it combines mark it as new
to science shape and shade — the special tinge,
akin to moonlight, tempering its blue,
the dingy underside, the checkered fringe.

My needles have teased out its sculptured sex;
corroded tissues could no longer hide
that priceless mote now dimpling the convex
and limpid teardrop on a lighted slide.

Smoothly a screw is turned; out of the mist
two ambered hooks symmetrically slope,
or scales like battledores of amethyst
cross the charmed circle of the microscope.

I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer — and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep)
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.

- Vladimir Nabokov, May 15, 1943