Genevieve Taggard, an American poet born in 1894, published this elegy in her 1922 collection *For Eager Lovers*, when modernist poets were replacing grand public mourning with close, unsentimental observation of small deaths. Taggard’s sympathies often lay with the unnoticed and the trampled, and here she turns a dead spider into exactly such a figure. The title does not say “dead spider”; it says “Magnificent Spinner, Murdered,” insisting that the spider was both an artist and a victim.
The speaker addresses the spider as “you,” measuring what has been lost. Its “nimble bones” could “spring and sprawl” on a thread spun from its own body, covering “half the meadow” with web. That thread was both movement and craft: the spider “stitched the air with level darts,” and the sun “slid on your silvers.” After death, the remaining lines “slant oblique / Like strokes of rain,” no longer architecture but scattered marks of damage. The opening quatrain moves in regular iambic pentameter with an ABAB rhyme, giving the creature a formal dignity. But after the ellipsis at “Like strokes of rain,” the poem loosens; its lines stretch unevenly, as if the death has broken the web’s precision.
The central idea is that the world does not pause for a murdered maker. The spider’s “neighbors” are not mourners but grazers: they “chew the cud of festoons,” turning the web into cattle feed. A “hairy enemy” carries a loop of spider silk on his cheek, and that dangling strand becomes “glee” that teases the skeleton. The image is both comic and cruel—a mockery of the spider’s art worn like a stray hair. Meanwhile, wasps “sting the grapes still” and haul away “spider-spoil” in “twisted torment,” converting the spider’s delicate silks into “crude honey” hanging in “muddy cones.” The contrast between the spider’s silvers and the wasps’ mud makes the poem quietly fierce: refined making is undone by rougher, more efficient scavengers. Even the bee seems to deliver a flat funeral drone: “One huge bee intones.” The pond, “wrinkled with a velvet oil,” waits to hatch “another spawn” of gnats. Death feeds the meadow.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to pretend that beauty confers permanence. Taggard sees the spider as a figure for any artist whose work can be erased, mocked, and metabolized by an indifferent world. Yet she also renders that erasure in language precise enough to preserve the spider’s splendor. The gnawing alliteration of “gnats and an ant have gnawed,” the hiss of “slid on your silvers,” the blunt stop of “You are dead”—these sounds make the spider vivid even as the verbs consume it. The poem’s own spinning becomes a small, stubborn counter-web.