Another light-and-dark butterfly pair

In my December 2 post "Synchronicity, symmetry, and Menelaus blue morpho (and blue Mormon) butterflies," I noted the coincidence of running into Morpho menelaus butterflies on the covers of two different books. The two butterflies looked the same except that one appeared to be a darker color than the other.

Then in December 7's "The lighter and darker Morpho menelaus butterflies," I again encountered two pictures of M. menelaus butterflies, one darker in color than the other.

In that second post, the butterflies were juxtaposed with the name Amber, which I interpreted as referring to the color amber (yellow-orange). In a comment, Debbie told a story about a monarch butterfly, and she mentioned that "Amber is also the color of the Monarch." I added a comment of my own further connecting the morpho and the monarch:

The Morpho menelaus butterfly is consistently described as having an "electric blue" appearance, and the etymology of electric leads us right back to amber. And of course the butterfly’s namesake, Menelaus, was a monarch, the king of Sparta.

The morpho and the monarch also belong to the same family of butterflies, Nymphalidae.

Today, August 9, I was looking through an English textbook for children, a new edition I haven't taught with before, and I found this in a reading passage on p. 63:

It's a monarch butterfly and a viceroy -- "not the same species, but they look like each other." Although these two species do not actually differ in color, the photographs chosen for the book make the viceroy look significantly darker -- so, as with the two morpho pairs, we have a pair of look-alike butterflies, one of which is darker than the other. These particular specimens are orange, not amber, but both species can be amber -- and, more to the point, Debbie had already explicitly connected her monarch butterfly with my morphos and with the color amber.

The very next page of the textbook, p. 64, used this sentence to illustrate a grammar point:

"This butterfly is not as pretty as the blue one" -- so even though the picture is of orange butterflies, not blue ones, the very next page explicitly mentions a blue butterfly.

For all three of these butterfly pairs, the color difference is an illusion, an artifact of the way in which they were photographed. Monarchs and viceroys are actually the same color. All Menelaus blue morphos are the same color, but their structural coloration means they can look very bright or very dark depending on the angle of the light.

Writing that last sentence made me think of an Anne Hills song my parents used to listen to. I don't know it very well, but I remembered these lines:

And in this leaning toward the night,

There is nothing without shadow,

And no dark without the bright,

In the angle of the light.

I looked up the lyrics, and this is what comes immediately after the lines I remembered:

We were sitting on a hill,

Finding four-leaf clover,

Sure that we had time to kill

Turning love and friendships over.

Words were borne upon the breeze,

Like September leaves we caught them,

Shared their colors, let them go

Just another day in autumn.

Four-leaf clover! In "The lighter and darker Morpho menelaus butterflies," I had connected this four-leaf clover image with the butterflies of the title:

The reference to "September leaves . . . in autumn" also ties in with this bit in Debbie's monarch butterfly comment on that post:

Also regarding your reference to Amber. Amber is also the color of the Monarch and Fire (ember) and in the Northen Hemisphere the season of FALL.

The 'ember' months, being : September, October, November and December until Dec 21 when we 'transform/transition' from FALL to winter.

The autumn leaves reference also made me go back and reread my poem "Humpty Dumpty revisited," in which Humpty "had a great fall" in the sense of enjoying the splendid autumn scenery. These lines caught my eye:

For Humpty Dumpty is my name,

The Sitter o'er the Sea of Flame,

And I intend to see it all

And stay till the last day of fall.

Humpty plans to stay "till the last day of fall," while Debbie also explicitly states that "FALL" (she emphasizes the word) lasts "until Dec 21." What really got my attention, though, was the reference to "The Sitter o'er the Sea of Flame." This title which Humpty claims for himself was a nod to Caspar David Friedrich's painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. By a weird coincidence, late last night I suddenly felt an urgent need to change the wallpaper on my phone. It has been a Marseille-style Ace of Swords for a long time, probably around a year, but I suddenly wanted something different, a very specific image.

This afternoon, I happened to pick up my phone at precisely 3:33. When that happens, it is my habit to take a screenshot to document a potential sync indicator:

I hadn't thought of "Humpty Dumpty revisited" until I wrote this post and looked up the Anne Hills song with its "September leaves" reference, so that poem played no conscious role in my sudden wallpaper-changing urge.