"Spidery" is an adjective, the kind of word we use for thin handwriting or long, nervous fingers. Yet the poem's first word is "who," a pronoun that expects a person. The grammar never settles. Something spidery "looks / at the morning," and the poem treats it as someone, so we cannot tell whether we are watching an actual spider, a human being, or a person who has become spidery. That uncertainty is useful, because it invites us to see ourselves in the creature.
The first stanza gives us the image: the morning seen "with eight eyes." Mornings are usually pictured as gentle, a fresh start, but here the day is met by a creature with far more eyes than it needs. The poem doesn't tell us what the eyes see, which suggests that the point is how the creature looks, not what lies in front of it. Eight eyes means eight times the watchfulness and eight times the chance of spotting something to dread. The word "looks" is stranded at the end of its line, so the act of looking comes across as the creature's whole occupation.
Then comes the turn. "Every day a worse fear / to make up" has no verb, so it reads like a diary entry, a chore list or a note to self. The phrase "make up" does a lot of work. Its main meaning is to invent: the fears are not found in the morning but fabricated. It also carries echoes of composing something, of covering a face with cosmetics, and of making up for a loss. Behind all of these sits the spider's own craft. A spider builds its web out of itself, and the poem suggests that this creature builds its fear the same way, spinning it from inside and then stretching it across the day. The poem never says this outright, but the word "make" invites the connection.
The word "worse" adds to the unease. It is a comparative with nothing to compare against, so we only know that yesterday's fear has been outdone and that tomorrow's will outdo today's. "Every day" turns this into routine, a quota to be met. The tone stays dry, even faintly comic, which keeps the poem from becoming melodramatic. Anxiety is presented almost as a job, one the spidery creature is oddly good at.
The construction is spare. There are two stanzas, three lines then two, with no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters. Each stanza contains exactly eight words, which echoes the eight eyes. Whether the poet planned this or it simply happened, it gives the poem a quiet symmetry. The rhythm is built from short, hesitant lines. "With eight eyes" packs three heavy syllables into a tight space, and "eight eyes" in particular slows the line to a stare. Sound links the stanzas as well: the long "a" of "eight," "day" and "make" runs through the key words, and the hard "k" of "looks" and "make" ties seeing to inventing. The missing full stop matters too. The last line trails off at "up," and the poem ends without closing, just as the fear it describes renews itself each morning.
What makes the poem worth reading is its reversal. Spiders are usually the thing people are afraid of, and here the spidery figure is the one afraid. The poem also suggests that better vision does not bring peace. Eight eyes might promise perfect awareness, but they only supply more raw material for the imagination to turn into dread. In sixteen words, the poem treats anxiety as a creative act, a web we spin ourselves and then get caught in. For a reader who has lain awake inventing worst cases, it is an uncomfortably accurate picture.