The poem is a small elegy for a spider, addressed directly as “you.” The speaker admires the spider’s former skill—how it could drop and swing on its own silk and stitch bright, straight lines across the air. Now that it has been killed, ants and gnats are already picking at its body, and even its web has sagged into slanting threads. The speaker’s tone is tender but unsentimental: death is shown as part of an ordinary, busy landscape. Wasps still steal from webs, ants hurry, a bee drones, and gnats will soon hatch over the pond. The poem creates a mood of quiet, almost eerie attention—half mourning, half fascinated by the way the meadow keeps going without the spider. The word “murdered” in the title gives the death a sense of injustice, but nature itself seems neither cruel nor sorry.
To a Magnificent Spinner, Murdered — Summary
Gnats and an ant have gnawed your nimble bones — You who could spring and sprawl on your own thread Down half the meadow. Under tiny stones The ant has stored your essence. You are dead.
You stitched the air with level darts : the sun Slid on your silvers. Now they slant oblique Like strokes of rain. . . .
Your neighbors have begun To chew the cud of festoons. From the cheek Of this, your hairy enemy, dangles one Loop of his glee to tease your skeleton.
Wasps sting the grapes still, carry spider-spoil In twisted torment past your web and on Where their crude honey hangs in muddy cones. The ants are hurried. One huge bee intones. The pond is wrinkled with a velvet oil Where gnats will hatch, with dusk, another spawn.