23 pages • 46 minutes read
Mr. Edwards and the Spider
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Themes
Preaching After the Fire: Facing a Profound Passivity
As a preacher, Edwards was intent on bringing his congregants close to God. But rather than focus on God’s message of love and mercy, Edwards, the speaker in Lowell’s poem, terrifies his parishioners into converting. Edwards’s extended metaphor comparing spiders and sinners showed the dangers that threaten when one does not repent and change one’s ways.
As Edwards whips his audience into a spiritual frenzy, urging them to take action against the fate of damnation or else risk the fate of God who can “destroy, / Baffle, and dissipate your soul” (Lines 26-27), there is a parallel sense of passivity that overtakes the “You” who seems unable to “play against a sickness past your cure” (Line 17). This torpor recalls the spiders from the first stanza, not the marching, swimming, active spiders but rather the ones that “purpose nothing but their ease and die” (Line 8).
Lowell shows how Edwards’s imagery not only catalyzed conversions but also worked to create a profound lack of will in his audience. Words like “lacerations,” “sickness,” “no long struggle,” “no desire,” “abolished will” all raise the questions, “How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure? (Line 18). Such lassitude is ironic because clearly, this was not Edwards’s intent, as Edwards’s forceful imagery was meant to terrify sinners into action not despairing surrender.
The Heaviness of Hell
Lowell understood the consequences of art, exploring the melancholy that afflicted not only Hawley, who seems to have been driven to suicide by Edwards’s preaching but also weighed down both writers, Edwards and Lowell. The weight of despair suffuses the poem despite the weightlessness conveyed by the marching, swimming spiders flying through the air of stanza one.
While the rigid beliefs of the preacher Edwards take on fanatical extremes, as the speaker accuses the You of “treason crackling in your blood” (line 13), Lowell modulates the fanaticism with his empathy for the You, Josiah Hawley. Not identified until the end of the poem, Hawley is the one taking the brunt of God’s anger, as the reader learns in the fifth stanza that Edwards aims all of his rhetorical power at the weak Hawley, his uncle.
Lowell delays revealing Hawley’s identity, allowing the You to symbolize the human condition and human struggle to find purpose in life and death. As the You is battered and beaten by the roaring Edwards, the reader feels the weight of depression descend. “But who can plumb the sinking of that soul?” (Line 37). The descent is only arrested, and the You is saved, not by God but by the Black Widow, who brings death and only death, no torture, no predestination, no everlasting fire.
Destabilizing the Power of Metaphor
Lowell moves back and forth between the young and old Edwards, shifting from metaphors of beauty to metaphors of terror as the poem shifts back and forth in time. The teenaged Edwards loves observing his spiders who seem to fly weightless in the air. He rejoices to see them decorate the skies. Edwards sees their November migrations to the sea as part of God’s design in controlling their populations since they will all drown at sea, which creates balance in the world. Lowell uses Edwards’s teenaged writing “On Insects and Spiders” for much of the first stanza.
But successive stanzas derive primarily from Edwards as an older preacher and his sermons on hell and suffering. He uses spiders as a metaphor for the plight of the sinner. The spiders become “loathsome insects” that God finds repulsive and is eager to drop into the fire, showing that sinners are repulsive to God.
While Edwards the preacher appropriates a negative interpretation of the spider as a vehicle to portray a vision of humanity as deeply sinful and powerless, the parallel voice of a younger Edwards extolling the beauty of spiders breaks the control of the preacher, as competing metaphors of spiders destabilize the idea of just one interpretation. And the introduction of the Black Widow at the end of the poem, further destabilizes the preacher’s power, as the Black Widow refuses to be contained by the hand of God.
Poets and Preachers: Portraying the Mastery of Mystery
Lowell initially portrays Edwards as a sympathetic young naturalist who observes the world of nature with wonder and delight. By the end of the poem, Edwards the preacher brutally exhorts his own uncle to imagine his torture in the fires of hell. The “two Edwards” seem quite different from each other, but Lowell’s poem collapses the distance between the two, allowing the reader insights into the complexity of the Calvinist preacher. Both young and old Edwards have a strong desire to master the mystery of the universe, whether it is the young Edwards’s desire to master the world of the mysterious spiders, or the older Edwards seeking to master the mysterious movements of God and his sinners.
Edwards the preacher and Lowell the poet must move beyond private efforts at mastering mystery. They seek to share their vision, finding ways to make their insights visible to their audience. The preacher Edwards masters the language of the poet to transform the everyday, busy spider into the motionless, dangling, loathsome spider, hanging from the hand of God. He makes his vision visceral to his audience, as the audience also feels God’s hand. Lowell further revises Edwards’s metaphor, as Lowell provides the reader with both spiders in his poem, letting them dangle between two different interpretations, innocence and guilt, until the final transformation into the powerful Black Widow who refuses to conform to either interpretation.
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By Robert Lowell
