Gentleness without pity, devotion without kindness,
Cruelty without self-seeking, murder
Without anger, in a brittle body patience
Without hope of heaven, making heaven in
The image of yourself, your heart the fountain
Of the veins of heaven, kernel and choir,
And from your head the rayed aureole that seems
A monstrance of the mind of light, the snare
Of spiralling orbits and at their centre the simple
Mystery of their making lifted up
In the garden for a sign even as the Host
Is lifted for those that have the eyes of need, oh armour
Of strange decision, charm of soft airs, oh Love
Arrayed with eight limbs as the Lord with His six-winged
Seraphim when Isaiah saw Him, terrible
Seems the high wood of your shoulders, awful the furred
Forest of your feet, but is the passion
Of your jaws not delight, are not
Your stalked eyes tender? What is tender? You were given
As beast and sign already in Eden and yet
You are unlearned, unlearned, for you are seen
Never yourself, the simple spider, head
One with body and arms spread or clutching
Your brief design in diamonds, but must be known
Always in a light not your own, in the fear
Of you, or the desire of you. Thus the work
Of your hands girdling the easy light
Of morning, winds and without seizing holds
The whole of day; thus too your waiting web,
Dewed and coloured in the dawn, must be
A wheel of ladders where all degrees of spirits
That between earth and heaven are, ascend
From elsewhere into you; and thus, but surely,
You, untouchable, waiting, are a shape
Of the horror of heaven, of the centre of spun light
Where all is seen, seen, where all is beheld,
Where all must change, must die and be raised
Another. Also there is the shape
Of the soul, that may not be seen except by lights
Alien to itself, as by the fear of you
Or the desire of you; that may not be known
Until it has been held up and shown hollow
In the clawed light of you, that seeks therefore
Shadows, what earth may conceal it, what darkness
May leave it safe and shapeless. In the comfort
Of darkness this soul came, but it is morning, and now
It would hide from your hairy reach, from the gray
Glaze of your eyes, from your gathering image
Of fearful light; it would flee from you, it would find
A shadow for shelter, it would stay undefined
And faithless, for they who put no trust
In the fear of you meet in you merely
The fixed point of all bright pain, to no end
But empty death. Yet where could it run: the gathering
Fright of you fills all the garden, the very
Splaying of directions is a figure of you, the sun’s light
Playing through the beams of yours is a gilded
Dim mirror from some forgotten life, even
The shadows are no more than the cast net
Of your web, even darkness, after the sight of you,
Is helpless to cover, to save, for this soul
Is wound with the tracery of your endless waking
As with an inescapable dream, and all spun worlds
Are woven in your one design. It comes to you, then,
Deluded from the cradling dark, and only when all
Flight has shown futile, with the slow bowed hesitance
Of submission. They finally who trust
Beyond your fearful visage, who put their faith
In the terror’s centre of yourself, even
In your jaws of light, wound in the same trammels,
Drawn to your same core of agony
And stricken there, and drained, oh beast, beyond
Your semblance, in that light and heaven
In whose sole image you are made, are lifted
Fearless without shadows and made new,
Oh Love, in your devouring, in your dawning.
Spider
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