A Garden Idyl
WITH sagest craft Arachne workedHer web, and at a corner lurked,Awaiting what should plump her soon,To case it in the death-cocoon.Sagaciously her home she choseFor visits that would never close;Inside my chalet-porch her feastPlucked 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’sAt best, is practical in plans;Subservient to the needy thought,However rare the weapon wrought.As long as Nature holds it goodTo urge her creatures’ quest for foodWill beauty stamp the just intentOf weapons upon service bent.For beauty is a flower of rootsEmbedded lower than our boots;Out of the primal strata springs,And shows for crown of useful things
Arachne’s dream of prey to sizeAspired; so she could nigh despiseThe puny specks the breezes roundSupplied, 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 wingsAre webbed, and in the lists he swings,A shrouded lump, for her to seeHer banquet in her victory.
This matron of the unnumbered threads,One day of dandelions’ headsDistributing their gray perruquesUp every gust, I watched with looksDiscreet 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 beardA 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 kin
Against her corner, humped and aged,Arachne wrinkled, past enraged,Beyond disgust or hope in guile.Ridiculously volatileHe seemed to her last spark of mind;And that in pallid ash declinedBeneath the blow by knowledge dealt,Wherein throughout her frame she feltThat 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 laidTheir gray-blue o’er the grass’s blade,And still along the garden-runThe blindworm stretched him, drunk of sun.Arachne crouched unmoved; perchanceHer visitor performed a dance;She puckered thinner; he the sameAs when on that light wind he came.
Next day was told what deeds of nightWere 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.