Vladimir Nabokov - A Discovery lyrics

I found it in a legendary land all rocks and lavender and tufted gra**, where it was settled on some sodden sand hard by the torrent of a mountain pa**. 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 checquered fringe. My needles have teased out its sculpted s**; 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 sleep), 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 bu*terfly.