Sherry Chandler » Poets and Spiders
Poets and Spiders
Garrison Keillor features Charles Goodrich’s poem “Vacuuming Spiders” today on The Writer’s Almanac. It’s a strong poem and I think you should click through and read it.
It reminded me that I had run across this Frost sonnet the other day, reading Richard Moore:
Range-finding
The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung
And cut a flower beside a ground bird’s nest
Before it stained a single human breast.
The stricken flower bent double and so hung.
And still the bird revisited her young.
A butterfly its fall had dispossessed
A moment sought in air his flower of rest,
Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.On the bare upland pasture there had spread
O’ernight ’twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread
And straining cables wet with silver dew.
A sudden passing bullet shook it dry.
The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly,
But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.—Robert Frost, from Mountain Interval (Henry Holt, 1920)
If I remember correctly, Moore interpreted this poem as indicating that nature is as bloody as war.
My son, on the other hand, saw it as indicating that nature is indifferent to man.
For me, I read a foreboding poem: nature innocent of the destruction that is about to come.
Of course, no poem is that easily categorized. Still, I wonder if reaction hinges on attitude toward spiders.
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