'His ripening talent broke suddenly into song'

In the course of writing my butterfly book, I spent some time seeking out butterfly-themed poems (the best of them are Emily Dickinson's butterfly poems, and Janet Lewis's 'The Insect', which you can find here, after the snails). A name that did not come my way was Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797-1839), author of a collection titled Loves of the Butterflies and of a lyric, popular in its time, 'I'd Be a Butterfly'. This piece, with a few others from Bayly's hand, finds its way into that wonderfully entertaining anthology of bad verse, The Stuffed Owl. The editors introduce it thus:'He married (1826) Miss Hayes of Marble Hill, Co. Cork, and during a stay with his young bride at Lord Ashdown's villa on Southampton Water his ripening talent broke suddenly into song with the composition of I'd Be A Butterfly, in which a strong desire to flutter to and fro like that beautiful and colourful insect was very graphically expressed. The poem was written, says a biographer, "in romantic circumstances"…