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Do you like spiders? The Victorian writer Charlotte M Yonge liked spiders as part of the natural world and wrote the poem 'The Gossamer Spider' to counterbalance more negative views of spiders in other poems for children.
David Barton was commissioned by Ruth and Nic Carlyle to produce this musical setting of 'The Gossamer Spider' for the 2023 bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte M Yonge. It is recorded here by Ruth Carlyle and David Barton. The album cover is by Nic Carlyle.
The Gossamer Spider
By Charlotte M Yonge
Creature no bigger than a pin,
Most wonderful of all that spin,
An acrobatic fairy.
Nay, what rope dancer from himself
Can draw his lines, like this small elf,
Marking his progress airy.
O’er breezy downs, from bent to bent,
That slender, viewless pathway went,
Traced in some moment’s shimmer;
But far too fine for common sight
Until the sunset’s sinking light
Makes the whole network glimmer.
From here, now there, a rainbow gleam
Floats o’er the turf in silvery stream
Of strange mysterious lightness
That early autumn’s frosts will strew
Each thread with glancing beads of dew,
Jewels of flashing brightness.
Or when the winds the grasses shake,
They blend the films in snowy flake;
So, said some ancient rhymer,
The lovely lady of the sky,
In twilight floating, green earth nigh,
There dropped her silvery cymar.
Notes:
1. “cymar” = scarf or “gottes-sammer”. Yonge notes that it was associated with Freya, but in Yonge’s time (mid 19th Century) had become the Virgin Mary’s gossamer, or Les fils de la Vierge in France and I filament de la Madonna in Italy.
2. Poem undated, but published in 1881 as part of Aunt Charlotte’s Evenings At Home with the Poets: A collection of poems for the Young, with conversations, arranged in Twenty-five Evenings.
