The finished structure, bar on bar,
     Had snatched from light to form a star,
     And struck on sight, when quick with dews,
     Like music of the very Muse. 
     Great artists pass our single sense;
     We hear in seeing, strung to tense;
     Then haply marvel, groan mayhap,
     To think such beauty means a trap. 
     But Nature’s genius, even man’s
     At best, is practical in plans;
     Subservient to the needy thought,
     However rare the weapon wrought. 
     As long as Nature holds it good
     To urge her creatures’ quest for food
     Will beauty stamp the just intent
     Of weapons upon service bent. 
     For beauty is a flower of roots
     Embedded lower than our boots;
     Out of the primal strata springs,
     And shows for crown of useful things

     Arachne’s dream of prey to size
     Aspired; so she could nigh despise
     The puny specks the breezes round
     Supplied, and let them shake unwound;
     Assured of her fat fly to come;
     Perhaps a blue, the spider’s plum;
     Who takes the fatal odds in fight,
     And gives repast an appetite,
     By plunging, whizzing, till his wings
     Are webbed, and in the lists he swings,
     A shrouded lump, for her to see
     Her banquet in her victory.

     This matron of the unnumbered threads,
     One day of dandelions’ heads
     Distributing their gray perruques
     Up every gust, I watched with looks
     Discreet beside the chalet-door;
     And gracefully a light wind bore,
     Direct upon my webster’s wall,
     A monster in the form of ball;
     The mildest captive ever snared,
     That neither struggled nor despaired,
     On half the net invading hung,
     And plain as in her mother tongue,
     While low the weaver cursed her lures,
     Remarked, “You have me; I am yours.”

     Thrice magnified, in phantom shape,
     Her dream of size she saw, agape. 
     Midway the vast round-raying beard
     A desiccated midge appeared;
     Whose body pricked the name of meal,
     Whose hair had growth in earth’s unreal;
     Provocative of dread and wrath,
     Contempt and horror, in one froth,
     Inextricable, insensible,
     His poison presence there would dwell,
     Declaring him her dream fulfilled,
     A catch to compliment the skilled;
     And she reduced to beaky skin,
     Disgraceful among kith and kin

     Against her corner, humped and aged,
     Arachne wrinkled, past enraged,
     Beyond disgust or hope in guile. 
     Ridiculously volatile
     He seemed to her last spark of mind;
     And that in pallid ash declined
     Beneath the blow by knowledge dealt,
     Wherein throughout her frame she felt
     That he, the light wind’s