23 pages • 46 minutes read
Mr. Edwards and the Spider
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Symbols & Motifs
Spiders
The first description of the spiders is full of wonder as the young Edwards gazes at the spiders that fill the summer air, seeming to fly as they build their webs among the trees. Edwards knows that the spiders will die, but he imagines a natural death as the spiders get swept up by the cold November wind that carries them to their eventual death.
The poem suddenly shifts to incorporate the views of the older Edwards, a Puritan preacher intent on saving the souls of his flock. Edwards uses his knowledge of spiders to create gripping images of sinners about to burn in hell. He uses the spiders that he knows so well but changes their symbolism when he shifts from the physical world to the spiritual world. The beautiful swimming spiders are now hovering over the pit of hell, symbols of the depravity of mankind. Spiders represent the sinner who is held aloft by the hand of God; God is eager to drop the traitorous sinner into the fires of hell.
Lowell changes the spider imagery yet again in the final line of the poem with the introduction of the Black Widow. Lowell strips Edwards’s metaphorical layers from the spider. No longer are the spiders helpless sinners held aloft by God. The Black Widow resists this metaphor and will not be held aloft, even by God. The Black Widow is compared to death, not to Edwards’s idea of death or Hawley’s idea of death or even Lowell’s idea of death. It firmly resists further attempts at metaphorical transformation, despite Edwards’s exhortations.
Hands
The spider is not the only example of personification. Religions often rely on personifications of God to make an abstract notion of a deity more understandable. In Edwards’s hands, God is personified as an angry person determined to get revenge. God has hands, and with those hands he holds us, the sinner, with disgust, ready to hurl us into the fires of hell. He is so angry he can’t wait to drop us into the fire where we will burn forever.
Edwards ended his famous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon with salvation, exhorting his audience to turn to the mercy of Jesus. But Lowell’s poem offers no such salvation. Instead, Lowell shifts from the angry hands of God to focus on the hands of the sinner. Lowell ends the second stanza with two rhetorical questions, “How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure” (Line 18). This is a poignant shift from the personified, angry God who seeks to dominate and destroy us to focus on the You who takes such battering and abuse. The You we later find out, is Edwards’s uncle, Josiah Hawley, but Lowell delays revealing this identity, showing that the You is really all of us. Lowell wants to depict the human desire to make meaning out of life, death, and suffering.
Edwards as a Boy
The entrance of the boy at the end of the terrifying third stanza is a shock. Lowell enjambs the line, creating more emphasis on the image of the boy. The boy brings to mind the first stanza, reminding the reader of the young Edwards’s fascination with nature and its creatures. Using the image of Edwards as a boy humanizes Edwards the preacher. When the young Edwards appears in stanza three, there is an expectation of a return to the innocent beautiful spiders that marched and swam in the summer air, as they did in stanza one. But Lowell subverts such expectations when suddenly the spider is thrown into the fire; it is implied that the boy throws the spider, showing that the need to understand death was always present for Edwards, even as a young boy.
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By Robert Lowell
