Today's literature poetry comparison
Design
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.
Robert Frost
A Noiseless Patient Spider
A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them-ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,-seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d-till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.
Walt Whitman
The other two poems in the prelim paper today were Helen Chasin's "The Word Plum" and Galway Kinnell's "Blackberry-Eating", but upon seeing Whitman and Frost I knew I just had to write about these lovely spiders.