The allusion to the “name” is of course to the Greek word, psyche, which signifies both soul and butterfly.  Psyche, as the soul, was pictured by the Greeks as a beautiful girl, with a somewhat sad face, and butterfly wings springing from her shoulders.  Coleridge tells us here that although the Greeks likened the soul to the butterfly, we must remember what the butterfly really is,—­the last and highest state of insect-being—­“escaped the slavish trade of earthly life.”  What is this so-called slavish trade?  It is the necessity of working and struggling in order to live—­in order to obtain food.  The butterfly is not much of an eater; some varieties, indeed, do not eat at all.  All the necessity for eating ended with the life of the larva.  In the same manner religion teaches that the soul represents the changed state of man.  In this life a man is only like a caterpillar; death changes him into a chrysalis, and out of the chrysalis issues the winged soul which does not have to trouble itself about such matters as eating and drinking.  By the word “reptile” in this verse, you must understand caterpillar.  Therefore the poet speaks of all our human work as manifold motions making little speed; you have seen how many motions a caterpillar must make in order to go even a little distance, and you must have noticed the manner in which it spoils the appearance of the plant upon which it feeds.  There is here an allusion to the strange and terrible fact, that all life—­and particularly the life of man—­is maintained only by the destruction of other life.  In order to live we must kill—­perhaps only plants, but in any case we must kill.

Wordsworth has several poems on butterflies, but only one of them is really fine.  It is fine, not because it suggests any deep problem, but because with absolute simplicity it pictures the charming difference of character in a little boy and a little girl playing together in the fields.  The poem is addressed to the butterfly.

  Stay near me—­do not take thy flight! 
  A little longer stay in sight! 
  Much converse do I find in thee,
  Historian of my infancy! 
  Float near me; do not yet depart! 
  Dead times revive in thee: 
  Thou bring’st, gay creature as thou art! 
  A solemn image to my heart,
    My father’s family.

  Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days,
  The time, when, in our childish plays,
  My sister Emmeline and I
  Together chased the butterfly! 
  A very hunter did I rush
  Upon the prey:  with leaps and springs
  I followed on from brake to bush;
  But she, God love her, feared to brush
  The dust from off its wings.

What we call and what looks like dust on the wings of a butterfly, English children are now taught to know as really beautiful scales or featherlets, but in Wordsworth’s time the real structure of the insect was not so well known as now to little people.  Therefore to the boy the coloured matter brushed from the wings would only have seemed so much dust.  But the little girl, with the instinctive tenderness of the future mother-soul in her, dreads to touch those strangely delicate wings; she fears, not only to spoil, but also to hurt.