The Rhetorician to His Spider

GOOD gossip, list! The lamp burns low,
As morning climbs our crumbling stair.
My tropes fade, too — but ere I go,
I praise the vigil that we share.

Thy shape transmuted should have shone
A golden spinner in the sky,
Where haunted Algol strays alone,
And gallant Argo plunges by.

More than to pipe on Marsyas’ note,
To outweave Pallas! Thou didst know
How skill-less was the hand that smote,
And mocked her web who wrought thy woe.

She housed thee in the common dust,
A withered creature, shrunk and gray;
She mated thee with moth and rust,
And named thee handmaid of decay —

Yet could not tame thy skill, or bring
Thy craft to aid the shame begun:
Each morning sees thee deftly fling
Thine ancient pattern on the sun.

We contradict their social cant:
Ours are not of the eyes that see
Griselda in the patient ant,
Or Brutus in the dying bee —

Mean traffickers for dusty trade,
Betrayers of the simple flowers!
We are recluses, subtle maid;
The solitary cult is ours.

We doubt their vulgar Paradise;
And, throned above the modern stir,
Heretically canonize
Saint Syntax and Saint Gossamer.

Yet serve we, too: thy tender coils
Alone entice the brawling fly;
I trip the demagogue in toils
Of syllogistic symmetry.

The unlettered, whom the letter kills,
May prate of charity for fools —
Through our pedantic peace yet thrills
The sacred fury of the Schools.

We laugh the pragmatist to scorn,
Who seeks his truth in loudest lies,
Awaiting, on the Judgment Morn,
Oracular majorities.

We dream a State of pure design,
Beyond the anarchy of swords,
Whose Code shall match thy lore with mine,
A perfect web of perfect words.

Thy woven heart, my broidered page,
My logic and thy legend, girl 舒
These isolate us from the Age,
In comradeship above the churl.

Let Peter or Mahomet save,
Jahveh — or Cretan Minos — damn;
So I may pledge, on Styx’s wave,
Arachne, in an epigram!