MR. EDWARDS AND THE SPIDER

Robert Lowell

From The Kenyon Review, Winter 1946, Vol. VIII, No. 1
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I saw the spiders marching through the air,

Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day

In latter August when the hay

Came creaking to the barn. But where

The wind is westerly,

Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly

Into the apparitions of the sky,

They purpose nothing but their ease and die

Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea;
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What are we in the hands of the great God?

It was in vain you set up thorn and briar

In battle array against the fire

And treason crackling in your blood;

For the wild thorns grow tame

And will do nothing to oppose the flame;

Your lacerations tell the losing game

You play against a sickness past your cure.

How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?
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A very little thing, a little worm,

Or hourglass-blazoned spider, it is said,

Can kill a tiger. Will the dead

Hold up his mirror and affirm

To the four winds the smell

And flash of his authority? It’s well

If God who holds you to the pit of hell,

Much as one holds a spider, will destroy,

Baffle and dissipate your soul. As a small boy
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On Windsor Marsh, I saw the spider die

When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire:

There’s no long struggle, no desire

To get up on its feet and fly

It stretches out its feet

And dies. This is the sinner’s last retreat;

Yes, and no strength exerted on the heat

Then sinews the abolished will, when sick

And full of burning, it will whistle on a brick.
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But who can plumb the sinking of that soul?

Josiah Hawley, picture yourself cast

Into a brick-kiln where the blast

Fans your quick vitals to a coal—

If measured by a glass,

How long would it seem burning! Let there pass

A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze

Is infinite, eternal: this is death,

To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.
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As a young man Lowell had read deeply in the life and writings of his mother’s ancestor, the eighteenth-century New England theologian Jonathan Edwards. “He was an ancestor,” Lowell said, “but this doesn’t make our relation exactly personal – another grandfather.” Perhaps, but early on in Lowell’s life, Edward’s work impressed upon him a belief in the hardness of life and the need to summon the courage to face what the pain of the world would deliver him. Edward’s writings stamped Lowell’s religious and historical thinking, as well his early poetry. Lowell abandoned his initial plan to write a biography of Edwards, but he returned to his life and work as the inspiration for four poems, including one of his greatest, “Mr. Edwards and the Spider,” which was published in Lord Weary’s Castle in 1946. Thirty years later, a few months before he died, it was one of the poems Lowell read during his last public reading at Harvard.

[from ROBERT LOWELL: SETTING THE RIVER ON FIRE by Kay Redfield Jamison]