Though in reality the spiders would also be removed from their indifferent interactions with humanity due to the world’s end, Eiseley mythologizes the lowly spider by esteeming them with an immunity to the fate of civilization. The second elevation of spiders occurs when they appear as “stars weave over” the void where earth once hung. In this vision of the future, Eiseley figures the creature that stars in in his poem as a metaphysical force, first as “time” with the world in its web, a metaphor for the chronic and inevitable decay of the planet.

By the final stanza, spiders have achieved a symbolic status that represents Eiseley’s view of nature’s longevity,Ĭaught in the invisible, stranded web of space.īy the end of the poem, the world has ended as well. The gall that Eiseley imputes to a spider who would desecrate a religious statue is comical in part thanks to Eiseley’s use of a defunct religion represented by a vandalized icon, but this detail deepens in meaning as the poem continues with examples of spiders’ indifference toward human culture.Įiseley uses the repeated syntax to define spiders, in this stanza as antiquarians, but his underlying aim is to reveal how little humans understand about the laws of animals. This stanza’s tongue-in-cheek punchline reminds the reader that animals are at once entities that interact with humanity and creatures that are liberated from obeying the laws of human civilization. Upon his face a squat tarantula is creeping… The sockets are hacked and empty as a skull. The black jade pillars totter in the halls of Marduk In one of his earliest poems (first published in 1928), “Spiders,” the opening poem in his collection All the Night Wings, he writes:įond of living among ghosts and haunted ruins, Like many writers interested in nature, Eiseley employs personification to situate animals within his poetry, but he also elevates them beyond mere likeness to humans. This focus on time, combined with his expertise in biological and environmental history, informs the unique manner in which Eiseley revertly sets the animal kingdom apart from the flawed human one. Scholars agree that time serves as a recurring and unifying theme throughout his work (Christensen Franke Schwartz).

Known primarily for his prose and essays on natural science, Loren Eiseley also wrote poetry, offering his readers yet another aspect of his reverence for nature.

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