Mr. Edwards and the Spider

In “Mr. Edwards and the Spider,” Lowell alludes to three prose works by the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards, “Of Insects and Spiders,” “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and “The Future Punishment of the Wicked Unavoidable and the Intolerable.” Of the three, the imagery and ideas in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and “The Future Punishment of the Wicked” are the most well-known and commonly associated with Jonathan Edwards, who wrote these sermons when he was an adult. These two works dominate “Mr. Edwards and the Spider.”

But a third prose excerpt, “Of Insects and Spiders,” is also included, a piece radically different in tone from the other two excerpts. Edwards wrote “Of Insects and Spiders” as a teenager, and it explores Edwards’s curiosity and wonder as he marvels at the tiny spider and its seeming ability to fly: “Of all insects, no one is more wonderful than the spider, especially with respect to their sagacity and admirable way of working” (Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Yale UP, 2004, p 64). “Of Insects and Spiders” shows a very different side to Edwards, one much less commonly known, an Edwards beholds the spider with delight and believes that the spiders’ movements reflect the glory and intellect of God’s creation.

Many of Lowell’s lines come directly from Edwards’s work, which can be seen when comparing the works of both authors side by side. Much of stanza one comes from “Of Insects and Spiders”:

Of these last, everyone knows the truth of their marching in the air from tree to tree. And once [I] saw a very large spider, to my surprise, swimming in the air in this manner, and others have assured me that they often have seen spiders fly. The appearance is truly very pretty and pleasing. (Edwards as qtd. in McMahon, C. M. “Of Insects and Spiders.” Reformed Theology at A Puritan's Mind.)

Compare this to Lowell’s poem:

I saw the spiders marching through the air,

Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day (Lines 1-2)

Here is another side-by-side example from “Of Insects and Spiders” and “Mr. Edwards”:

So, here in New England, I have observed that they never fly except when the wind is westerly, and I never saw them fly but when they were hastening directly towards the sea (Edwards).

…But where

The wind is westerly,

Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly

Into the apparitions of the sky,

They purpose nothing but their ease and die

Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea (Lowell, Lines 4-9).

Despite Lowell’s heavy reliance on Edwards’s source, there are significant differences. Lowell arranges the prose into highly structured nine-line stanzas following an established variety of metrical iambic feet (5, 5, 4, 4, 3, 5, 5, 5, 6) and a rhyme scheme with some variations (ABBACCCDD). In Lowell’s book, the poem is laid out with the left margins indented to reflect the shorter and longer lengths of the poem, squeezing in the middle and then opening back up again, almost in the shape of the hour glassed spider. The iambic rhythms emphasize the marching cadence of the spiders and the shorter middle line often works to focus on the central image in the stanza.

In addition to creating this intricate form as a container for Edwards’s prose, Lowell shifts from Edwards’s tone of admiration and wonder in his lines “The appearance is truly very pretty and pleasing” (“Of Insects and Spiders”) to a tone of resignation (“They purpose nothing but their ease and die,” Line 8). The lively marching and swimming spiders are swept up in the inexorable “westerly” wind that carries them to their deaths. In the Edwards source, Edwards points out that the spiders’ deaths at sea are welcome evidence of God’s great and intelligent design of the universe, as the world does not have to suffer from the over-population of spiders. For Lowell, the deaths of the spiders are more ominous. The spider’s doom foreshadows the doom of the sinners as they are also heading to their end: the pit of hell.

The theological question opening stanza two — “What are we in the hands of the great God?” — is a sudden break from the pastoral setting of stanza one. This line is a clear allusion to Edwards’s famous 1741 sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The tone from the sermon is passionate as he exhorts the sinner to fear the wrath of God. Edwards used terrifying imagery to depict the torments of hell, emphasizing the precarious position of the sinner who refuses to accept God’s mercy. The sinner is symbolized by a spider, a “loathsome insect,” whom God holds in his hands, ready to drop the sinner/spider into the fires of hell, a clear transformation from stanza one’s early description of the spider as wondrous (Vandermolen, Larry, and Irene Cheung. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741)." W. W. Norton & Company.)

But in Lowell’s version, before arriving at the transformed spider, Lowell introduces a “You” whose efforts to resist God’s power are fruitless as the “You” simply gets wounded by the thorny defense he has created. “Your lacerations tell the losing game / You play against a sickness past your cure” (Lines 16-17). The Puritan doctrines of original sin and depravity emphasize that Man is born a sinner. While the “You” may have done nothing intentionally evil, the You’s very existence is evil. (“Treason crackling in your blood,” Line 13). The speaker’s tone is contrasted with the You’s response. The You is burdened by guilt and sin, as seen with his use of back-to-back rhetorical questions: “How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?” (Line 18). This weariness echoes the spiders at the end of stanza one who are doomed to their deaths, just as the You is doomed for the fire. The “You” cannot win against such a powerful God despite valiant attempts at a “battle array” (Line 12).

Stanza three, the middle stanza, crescendos to a terrifying intensity as it concludes that

It’s well

If God who holds you to the pit of hell

Much as one holds a spider, will destroy,

Baffle and dissipate your soul (Lines 24-27).

These are brutal lines. The wrath of God is so immense and the existence of the You so repulsive to God that the speaker concludes that it is “well” for God to destroy him. The stanza is wild as it lurches from image to image, allowing the scale to violently fluctuate as it starts with the “very little thing” (worm, deadly spider) with a power to kill a much bigger “tiger,” followed by the fact that these “powers” all pale against the colossal power of the Almighty. Man is nothing but a “smell” that will dissipate with the “four winds” (Lines 23).

Lowell uses enjambed lines to powerful effect throughout the poem, but especially at the end of stanza three where he ends his brutal stanza with the enjambed phrase, “as a small boy” (Line 27). Suddenly the poem is re-scaled from the immense God to a small boy, allowing for a poignancy as the reader is reminded of the stakes; even the small boy is destined for the fire.

But stanza four shifts the reader’s expectations dramatically, as the small boy is not entirely innocent. Lowell returns to the pastoral landscape and the innocent spiders of stanza one as he imagines Edwards as a young boy, a budding naturalist observing the world. Suddenly, the spider is “thrown into the bowels of fierce fire” (Line 29). The poem does not assign direct agency, but it is implied that the young boy is the one who threw the spider in the fire, completing an action that God, despite his threats, never actually does in Edwards’s sermon. God dangled the sinner over the fire; the boy throws the spider into the fire, not out of anger but like a dispassionate scientist observing the results of an experiment.

The spider burns instantly and never has a chance to escape. But Lowell extends this quick incineration by having Edwards reflect on the idea that the spider has

No long struggle, no desire

To get up on its feet and fly

It stretches out its feet

And dies (Lines 30-33).

Ironically, in stating there is “no struggle,” Lowell is in fact showing a struggle by spending four lines depicting this anthropomorphized spider with feet. Lowell personifies the spider, not as Edwards does, where the spider symbolizes the sinner who dangles over the pit of fire but instead as an image of a depressed patient, something Lowell knew all too well due to his many mental breakdowns. Jonathan Edwards also suffered from severe depression, which Lowell knew from his studies. The spider who dies with “no long struggle” (Line 30) ironically captures the central struggle of humanity who cannot escape original sin but instead flounders, trapped in a profound passivity and depression.

But Lowell interrupts this metaphoric reflection, dramatically returning to the literal circumstances of what is happening on Windsor Marsh. Lowell ends the stanza with its lines that include the harsh rhyme “sick” and “brick,” which also creates a sibilant consonance between “sick” and “whistle” (Lines 35-36). The alliterative burning and brick as well as the alliterative will’s with the onomatopoetic whistle contribute to powerful sounds of roaring fire.

The poem does not end with the spider’s death. Remarkably, the final stanza suddenly reveals that the “You” is actually Josiah Hawley, Jonathan Edwards’s uncle. It is his own uncle that Edwards shockingly urges to

Picture yourself cast

Into a brick-kiln where the blast

Fans your quick vitals to a coal— (Lines 38-40)

The lines throb with monosyllabic words full of harsh consonance and compression (“brick-kiln,” “blast,” “quick vitals to a coal”) that pound a vicious rhythm as one imagines Hawley’s brutal death. These words take on added poignancy when one realizes that Hawley ended up committing suicide, cutting his throat presumably as a result of tortured anxiety over the state of his soul. The speaker recalls how “eternity” erases our human sense of time, removing any hourglass measurements: “A minute, ten, ten trillion” (Line 43). But then strangely, in the last two lines, the poem ends with “This is death/ To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death” (Lines 44-45).

Death is transformed yet again. It is the knowledge of death that brings death; life becomes reconfigured as nothing but constant motion towards death. Death exists side by side with life; the young Edwards knew that his lively summer spiders would be dead by November. Knowledge of death is in itself a form of death, since time collapses and the future presses against the present. Once death is known, the knowledge remains poignantly and ironically embedded in life. Edwards terrified his flock because of his ability to re-interpret death with such vivid imagery that life could no longer exist without awareness of the endless fire.

“But who can plumb the sinking of that soul?” (Line 37).

Hawley falls into the terrifying, sinking abyss, but the fall is abruptly stopped by the appearance of the Black Widow. The spider no longer is the helpless sinner falling relentlessly into the fires. The spider is no longer held by God, left to dangle over the pit. Not even God will hold the venomous Black Widow. The spider reclaims its power and autonomy and by the end of the poem, is stripped of all theological interpretations. All of Edwards’s fearsome imagery and visions are gone. The Black Widow symbolizes death. That is all. Not sin. Not punishment. Not depravity. Not Calvinist beliefs in predestination. Not treason or abolished will. Only death.