Victorious Insect

The fascination of dragonflies

Left to right: Southern hawker (f); Dragonfly nymph, Sydenham Hill Wood; Exuviae, Sydenham Hill Wood; Southern hawker (m), Southampton

I was in the kitchen the other day when I heard a loud buzzing, like an electrical circuit shorting. A large dragonfly had become trapped between the upper and lower frames of the sash window, which I had opened on account of the warmth of the day. I think it was a female southern hawker (Aeshna cyanea), but I’m open to correction.

A couple of days later we were visiting friends in Southampton, whose garden slopes steeply towards their small woodland and pond. We were sitting on the patio when a dragonfly settled on a nearby cherry laurel – another southern hawker, judging by the two pale spots on its thorax, this time a male.

I’d been volunteering at my local nature reserve the previous week, clearing duckweed from a pond, when a large dragonfly larva came up in the net. They are every bit as unattractive as the adults are elegant; scaly khaki monsters with fierce jaws, they spend three to four years in water, devouring any pond life unfortunate enough to swim into their orbit, until they have grown to the size of a man’s little finger, by which stage they will eat tadpoles and even small fish.

Once the larva is ready to metamorphose, it will climb up a reed or flag iris at the water’s edge, its head will split open and the adult will emerge, leaving the husk of its former self (known as an exuvia) behind, gradually take on colour and pump fluid into its wings. Once the wings have expanded and hardened, they will start to vibrate rapidly, until the dragonfly is ready to take to the air.

Tennyson’s 1833 poem ‘The Dragon-Fly’ describes the process well:

Today I saw the dragon-fly
Come from the wells where he did lie.
An inner impulse rent the veil
Of his old husk: from head to tail
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.
He dried his wings: like gauze they grew;
Thro’ crofts and pastures wet with dew
A living flash of light he flew.

Goethe also devoted an early verse, 'Die Freuden’ (The Joys) – which he appears to have adapted from a French poem about a butterfly – to a dragon- or damselfly, ‘changeable… Like a chameleon;/ Now red and blue, now blue and green.’

Fossils show that the Odonata, the insect order to which dragonflies and damselflies belong, are among the oldest creatures still in existence, having been around since the Late Triassic more than 200 million years ago. Their huge compound eyes give them almost 360-degree vision, while their four wings can move independently, allowing them to zig-zag forward, backward and sideways in a fraction of a second, and they can reach speeds of up to 30mph.

Their elegance, agility and dramatic transformation have made them a recurrent symbol in literature, art and folklore, and they feature prominently in Native American, Celtic, South Asian and Japanese traditions. In his poem ‘A Dragonfly in the Sun’, the acclaimed Pakistani novelist and poet Zulfikar Ghose (1935–2022), evoked the insect as a symbol of the transience of existence.

Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek-Irish writer who did much to popularise Japanese culture in the West, devoted a chapter of his book A Japanese Miscellany (1901) to dragonflies. ‘Japan well deserves to be called the Land of the Dragon-fly,’ he wrote. ‘Probably no other country of either temperate zone possesses so many kinds of dragon-flies.’ Both the great Edo-period woodblock engravers Kitagawa Utamaro (c.1754–1806) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) depicted dragonflies in their prints, while the hunting prowess of these ‘victorious insects’ made them a favoured emblem of the samurai, who wore models of them as crests on their helmets.

As for the dragonfly in our kitchen window, I was concerned that it would injure itself in its vain attempts to fly through the glass, so I carefully moved the frame until it could escape, caught it in a jar and released it outdoors, whereupon it flew away, vigorously cresting the breeze and clearly unhurt.

‘No person telling a story in real life begins at the beginning… for it will come back to you in patches, an incident here, another of ten years earlier…’ ― Ford Madox Ford

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Some Of It Was True…

Thoughts on writing non-fiction

The recent revelations in The Observer about Raynor Winn’s memoir The Salt Path raised some interesting questions about veracity in non-fiction. I haven’t read the book, so I won’t comment on the specifics, but as a writer of non-fiction I found myself thinking once again about the fine line between what we might describe as creative shaping of the raw material and downright falsification, and thought I would now post this edited version of a talk I gave to the Authors’ Club in London in 2017: