With sagest craft Arachne worked Her web, and at a corner lurked, Awaiting what should plump her soon, To case it in the death-cocoon.
Sagaciously her home she chose For visits that would never close;Inside my chalet-porch her feast Plucked all the winds but chill North-east.
The finished structure, bar on bar, Had snatched from light to form a star, And struck on sight, when quick with dews, Like music of the very Muse.
Great artists pass our single sense;
We hear in seeing, strung to tense;
Then haply marvel, groan mayhap, To think such beauty means a trap.
But Nature's genius, even man's At best, is practical in plans;Subservient to the needy thought, However rare the weapon wrought.
As long as Nature holds it good To urge her creatures' quest for food Will beauty stamp the just intent Of weapons upon service bent.
For beauty is a flower of roots Embedded lower than our boots;Out of the primal strata springs, And shows for crown of useful thingsArachne's dream of prey to size Aspired; so she could nigh despise The puny specks the breezes round Supplied, and let them shake unwound;Assured of her fat fly to come;
Perhaps a blue, the spider's plum;
Who takes the fatal odds in fight, And gives repast an appetite, By plunging, whizzing, till his wings Are webbed, and in the lists he swings, A shrouded lump, for her to see Her banquet in her victory.
This matron of the unnumbered threads, One day of dandelions' heads Distributing their gray perruques Up every gust, I watched with looks Discreet beside the chalet-door;And gracefully a light wind bore, Direct upon my webster's wall, A monster in the form of ball;The mildest captive ever snared, That neither struggled nor despaired, On half the net invading hung, And plain as in her mother tongue, While low the weaver cursed her lures, Remarked, "You have me; I am yours."Thrice magnified, in phantom shape, Her dream of size she saw, agape.
Midway the vast round-raying beard A desiccated midge appeared;Whose body pricked the name of meal, Whose hair had growth in earth's unreal;Provocative of dread and wrath, Contempt and horror, in one froth, Inextricable, insensible, His poison presence there would dwell, Declaring him her dream fulfilled, A catch to compliment the skilled;And she reduced to beaky skin, Disgraceful among kith and kinAgainst her corner, humped and aged, Arachne wrinkled, past enraged, Beyond disgust or hope in guile.
Ridiculously volatile He seemed to her last spark of mind;And that in pallid ash declined Beneath the blow by knowledge dealt, Wherein throughout her frame she felt That he, the light wind's libertine, Without a scoff, without a grin, And mannered like the courtly few, Who merely danced when light winds blew, Impervious to beak and claws, Tradition's ruinous Whitebeard was;Of whom, as actors in old scenes, Had grannam weavers warned their weans, With word, that less than feather-weight, He smote the web like bolt of Fate.
This muted drama, hour by hour, I watched amid a world in flower, Ere yet Autumnal threads had laid Their gray-blue o'er the grass's blade, And still along the garden-run The blindworm stretched him, drunk of sun.
Arachne crouched unmoved; perchance Her visitor performed a dance;She puckered thinner; he the same As when on that light wind he came.
Next day was told what deeds of night Were done; the web had vanished quite;With it the strange opposing pair;
And listless waved on vacant air, For her adieu to heart's content, A solitary filament.
