Glow Worms And Fireflies In Art And Illustration

Short-story writers always have been subject at the same time to both a stricter technical discipline and a wider freedom than the novelist. Short-story writers have known–and solved by nature of their choice of form—what novelists seem to have discovered in despair only now: the strongest convention of the novel, prolonged coherence of tone, to which even the most experimental of novels must conform unless it is to fall apart, is false to the nature of whatever can be grasped by human reality.

How shall I put it? Each of us has a thousand lives and a novel gives a character only one. For the sake of the form. The novelist may juggle about with chronology and throw narrative overboard; all the time his characters have the reader by the hand, there is a consistency of relationship throughout the experience that cannot and does not convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be pure of—the present moment.
Nadine Gordimer in Charles E. May’s Short Story Theories collection

We followed up the river as we rode,
And rode till midnight when the college lights
Began to glitter firefly-like in copse
“The Princess” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

For people living through the Victorian era, if a firefly ever came into your home, this meant someone would die soon.

Also in Japan, fireflies symbolise the human soul and prefigure death. Studio Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies uses this symbolism most obviously.

From Japanese children’s magazine, Kodomo no kuni.

Gyo Fujikawa glow worms

Okoson Ohara, Fireflies, 1934

Japanese Fireflies over the Uji River by Moonlight

Haruyo Kawashima, illus. for Kansatsu ehon kindabukku, vol. 6, no. 7, 1933 glow worms

Annie Louisa Swynnerton (British painter) 1844 – 1933 The Glow Worm

October, 1916 magazine cover art by C Coles Phillips

DUANE BRYERS (American, 1911-2012) Hilda Chasing Fireflies at Nightfall, Brown & Bigelow

Broučci (Fireflies) classic children’s book by Jan Karafiát, Czech, early 1870s. Illustration by Jiří Trnka

Donn P. Crane (1878-1944) ‘How The Firefly Got His Light’ in Through The Wildwood 1946 Vol 3

Fanny Cory Cooney (1877-1972) from The Fairy Alphabet

The Elfin Knight, Gertrude Mittelmann. The Modern Gift Book for Children 1948 (accompanying the poem below)

A Fairy In Armor by Joseph Rodman Drake

He put his acorn helmet on;
It was plumed of the silk of the thistle down;
The corslet plate that guarded his breast
Was once the wild bee's golden vest;
His cloak, of a thousand mingled dyes,
Was formed of the wings of butterflies;
His shield was the shell of a lady-bug green,
Studs of gold on a ground of green;
And the quivering lance which he brandished bright,
Was the sting of a wasp he had slain in fight.
Swift he bestrode his fire-fly steed;
He bared his blade of the bent-grass blue;
He drove his spurs of the cockle-seed,
And away like a glance of thought he flew,
To skim the heavens, and follow far
The fiery trail of the rocket-star.

Edmund Dulac’s illustration for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 1908 firefly

Fire Fly Dance Sheet Music cover, early 1900s

Sam and the Firefly (1958) by P. D. Eastman

Anne of Green Gables illustration by Hanuol (Kim Ji Hyuck). “A Night Full of Stars” imagines a land below us equally bright and starlit as the world above.