On the Silk Thread of Invention

A season for spider poetry. The marriage of E. B. White and Katharine Sergeant Angell White. Poems by Timothy Steele and Sarah Freligh.

Oct 28, 2024

Spider web as captured by my friend in Vermont. (Credit: Lindsey Julow)

It is late October which means that we are on the verge of Halloween—that time of year when (mostly fake) spider webs adorn our neighborhood, reminding me of this poem by Timothy Steele1:

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Orb Weavers  (2024) by Timothy Steele

Ubiquitous now fall’s in town,
They’ll vanish as the season ebbs.
Till then, we pay them due regard
And, working in the shed or yard,
Steer clear of where they, upside down,
Hang in the center of their webs.

Disturbed, they scramble to a rafter
Or drop and hide where leaves have fallen.
At times, fog beads their webs with wet,
And windblown twigs are all they net.
At times, balked of the prey they’re after,
They catch and dine on grains of pollen.

We read in the great wheels they rig
Epitomes of patient skill.
Some of us think of E. B. White,
Whose spider used her webs to write
Encomia for her friend the pig
And made him too renowned to kill.

Before they perish, they’ll prepare
A brood of future engineers:
They’ll find a safe spot to attach
An egg sac; come spring, young will hatch
And, casting silk chutes to the air,
Balloon away to their careers.

For now, these ancient ones remain.
Matrons of the autumnal scene,
Plump and attired in black and gold,
They spin, in night’s enriching cold,
Their galaxies of strands and reign
Under the stars of Halloween.


Shared with permission of the poet. 
Published in Literary Matters 16.1 (Fall, 2023)

The form echoes the subject matter beautifully. Written in iambic tetrameter, the short lines bear a steady musical beat while the ABCCAB rhyme scheme creates stanzas that weave in and out like the circular design of a web. With that turn at the end toward Halloween it makes it a great poem to share with my kids who know about E. B. White’s spider from bedtime readings. In fact, my 9-year-old recently chose to reread Charlotte’s Web for her literacy choice time at school. It’s amazing that a 192-page book published in 1952 still resonates so strongly with children in 2024. But then again, it was written by a man who believed this:

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth… Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net.2

I’ve told my youngest that E.B. White was also a poet and read her “Natural History” which he wrote to his wife Katharine while he was traveling away from home. Since I will be at an out-of-state conference this week3, this last stanza seems especially befitting:

Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider's web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.

“Natural History” was written in 1929, the same year that E. B. White and Katherine Sergeant Angell eloped. The next year, Katharine, who already had two children from her first marriage, gave birth to Joel, her first and only child with White. The small family ended up moving up to Maine, and they remained married for 48 years until Katharine’s death in 1977 at the age of 84. E. B. White would follow in 1985 at the age of 86.

I‘ve always been intrigued by E. B. White’s relationship with Katharine—the whip-smart, divorced mother of two who worked as an editor at a fledgling magazine called The New Yorker. It was there that she and Andy (as White preferred to be called) met and fell in love. An intellect in her own right, Katharine was the magazine’s first fiction editor and she helped develop the careers of Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Taylor, John Cheever, Jean Stafford, and John Updike among many others. Those who are interested in learning more about Katharine can pick up Amy Reading's new biography, The World She Edited: Kartharine White at the New Yorker (which I have not read yet since it just came out this September).

Despite her many years as a writer and editor, Katharine White’s only book, Onward and Upward in the Garden, was published posthumously, a project edited by her bereft husband.4 Writers often find working with words to be the best way to grapple with their grief. C. S. Lewis after Joy Davidman. Donald Hall after Jane Kenyon.5 It is not surprising that E. B. White would take on this book project as a way of remembering his wife, keeping her words around him and then putting them out into the world for everyone to read. Much like with Charlotte’s children in his story, Katharine’s words were her progeny, her lasting gift to those she left behind.

All of this reminds me of “Wondrous” — a poem by Sarah Freligh which closes out her prize-winning collection, Sad Math. Just as in Steele’s “Orb Weavers” E. B. White and Charlotte’s Web make an appearance, but in the case of “Wondrous” the reference is an essential element that makes the connection between memory and mourning.

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Wondrous by Sarah Freligh

I’m driving home from school when the radio talk
turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit
the here and now of the freeway at rush hour,

travel back into the past, where my mother is reading
to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs
and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte

has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing
at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math,
how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief

multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried
seventeen times to record the words She died alone
without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during

which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying
for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention —
wondrous how those words would come back and make

him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice
ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp,
the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.


Shared with permission of the poet. 
Published in Sad Math (Moon City Press, 2015)

Written in free verse tercets, this is a very different poem than Steele’s formal offering. The enjambment between stanzas is startling and breathless, with obvious attention paid to the choice of words that end each line.

Each stanza sets a scene that flashes back and forward in time. The speaker of the poem is in a car listening to the radio, and just the mention of E. B. White’s birthday takes her back to the past, when her mother is reading Charlotte’s Web to her and her sister. As the mother cries it triggers an association to the fact that E. B. White cried while trying to write She died alone. And as he admonishes himself for being upset over an imagined character, the poem shifts again to the speaker in the car — in awe that ten years after her mother has died, she can hear her mother crying. She hears the sound of her mother composing herself and reassuring her daughters that she is okay.

The readers of this poem are meant to relate the three characters to each other: the speaker, the mother, and E. B. White. All three of them are grieving an imagined person. In the case of White and the mother, a make-believe Charlotte is making them cry. However, for the speaker, it is the memory of the mother — the real and once-living mother — that is the subject of grief.

This poses a very interesting idea: that all the people we love become imaginary because after they die we can only then experience our love of them through the faculty of our imaginations and the accuracy of our memories. Given the faulty nature of recollection, this is terrifying. Complete loss is all but inevitable as one loses the ability to reliably recall the details of the one you love.

Love is what we experience through one of God’s greatest gifts to us: our imaginations. Memory is a type of imagination, and in order to imagine anything you must have some type of memory. How we articulate any of this is through language and art, signs and symbols.

Poetry itself is a special form of language that is crafted to be remembered. In Greek mythology, the Muses of poetry are the daughters of Memory. Freligh’s poem embodies this myth as the memory of the mother becomes the poetry of the daughter.

Also, how wondrous that reading E. B. White’s love poem to his new bride in later years could be read as a grief poem after her passing:

Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider's web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.

The consolations that our loved ones give us are the three silk threads braided into a strong twine: invention, imagination and memory. They return to us, years after they die, on that surprisingly thin, but strong line. And if they are gifted with words, as Charlotte was, they can weave something for us to look at and read, to save our lives in times of darkness.

I believe all love poems, if you wait long enough, become grief poems.

My daughter’s hand holding up our copy of *Charlotte’s Web* on a beautiful fall day. (Credit: Zina Gomez-Liss)

On describing how he came to write Charlotte’s Web, E. B. White had this to say:

All that I ever hope to say in books is that I love the world.6

A worthy goal.

I think he said it well.

Does Charlotte’s Web or any of E. B. White’s books have a special place in your heart?

Do you know of any other E. B. White poems?

Does the poem Wondrous speak to your own memories?

I would love to hear your comments.

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