The Spider Works

The titles of the Spider works are drawn from a line in The Manor Garden by Sylvia Plath. The titles refer to how I feel I have begun to develop my own visual language in my work.

Whilst there is a palpable sense of foreboding, there is a magical potent energy too in the fashioning of the out-of-death-comes-birth-and-new-life themes within the poem. I think ‘the spider on its own string crosses the lake’ is a reference to Sylvia Plath’s forging of her own distinct path as a poet despite the challenges she faced in her life, which frustrated and made difficult that undertaking.

The Manor Garden by Sylvia Plath

The fountains are dry and the roses over.

Incense of death. Your day approaches.

The pears fatten like little buddhas.

A blue mist is dragging the lake.

You move through the era of fishes,

The smug centuries of the pig-

Head, toe and finger

Come clear of the shadow. History

Nourishes these broken flutings,

These crowns of acanthus,

And the crow settles her garments.

You inherit white heather, a bee’s wing,

Two suicides, the family wolves,

Hours of blankness. Some hard stars

Already yellow the heavens.

The spider on its own string

Crosses the lake. The worms

Quit their usual habitations.

The small birds converge, converge

With their gifts to a difficult borning.