Winifred Welles’s “Cobweb” begins with a beam of sunlight picking out a web stretched between a dark pine and another tree. The light shining through its “bones” makes the web look like a “graceful skeleton” or an “unfinished frame of faery,” so insubstantial that it seems “as frail as words.” That comparison is the first sign that the poem is not really about an insect’s trap. By the eighth line the speaker has turned the web into a figure for human intimacy, comparing its thread to “that invisible one / Of speech and silence between you and me.” The central concern, then, is not nature but love: how it binds people, how beautiful and fragile that binding is, and how dangerous its maker may be.
From the start, Welles places the web between shadow and light. “A dark pine” gives a solid, shadowy anchor, while “another tree” stays deliberately vague, as if the web joins the known to the unknown. The sunlight does not simply reveal the web; it “unearthed” it, as though beauty had to be dug out of darkness. “Skeleton” and “faery” pull in opposite directions—one anatomical and deathly, the other magical and airy—yet both describe the same object. That tension is the poem’s engine. The words “bones,” “frame,” and “frail” keep returning to the idea that the web is both structure and near-nothingness, something strong enough to hold between two trees yet thin enough to be broken by a breath.
The poem has the shape of a sonnet—fourteen lines of mainly iambic pentameter—but its music is deliberately unsettled. The line “It joins a dark pine to another tree” moves in a steady iambic current, and later the ugly line “The spider lurks there blotched and poisonous” is drawn into the same measured music, so that beauty and threat share one rhythm. In the opening octave, “tree,” “be” and “me” chime together, while “sun,” “spun” and “one” form another thread of sound; “faery” and “skeleton” sit more awkwardly, their extra syllables refusing a neat rhyme. That half-regular music mirrors the web itself: ordered enough to hold, irregular enough to tremble. In the sestet, end words pair off in a shadowy mirror—“poisonous” echoes “us,” “will” meets “still,” and “spit” snaps shut with “it”—so that the poem’s close tightens like a caught thread.
Then, in the ninth line, the poem turns sharply from the delicate web to its maker: “The spider lurks there blotched and poisonous.” The spider is not merely an insect but a “monstrous god” who can “belch beauty from a stomachful of spit.” The verb “belch” is deliberately ugly; it drags the poem down from faery to gut, from silver thread to digestive slime. Yet the spider’s power is creative as well as repulsive: the same creature that produces poison also spins the exquisite web. The speaker watches this and then superimposes it on love. Love, the speaker says, “unwinds and weaves” the “silver binding us,” as if human affection were spun from the same ambiguous substance. The present participles “dreaming” and “binding,” followed by the ongoing verbs “unwinds” and “weaves,” keep the action continuous, as though love is always being made and remade, never finished. Capitalised, “Love” becomes the other maker in the poem, a counter-spider that also spins “silver” thread.
The closing couplet matters because it refuses to settle. The speaker’s heart “grows still” and “cries that Love is lovely — isn’t it ?” The stillness may be awe or fear; the question mark turns the affirmation into a plea. If love is a web, are we admiring its beauty or caught in it? The poem does not answer. Its significance lies in that uneasiness: it uses a traditional love-lyric form to ask whether love’s loveliness can be separated from the predatory, possessive, even poisonous impulse that creates it. The web joins tree to tree, just as love joins one person to another, but the spider waits at the centre, blotched and dangerous.