The Spider
The hand resembles a Spider,
No, the Spider resembles a hand,
The web on the ceiling grows wider,
So I’ll take it out onto the land,
Every year as it becomes so cold,
The ‘hands’ they seem to multiply,
The ceiling it gives way to the mould,
And I swear the Spiders shall die,
Here they return, back once again,
Sat proudly upon the wind sill,
So I’ll flush them down into the
drain,
Yes, I’ve gone in for the kill
The hand resembles a Spider,
No, the Spider resembles a hand,
The Spider returns, the Spider is
gone,
But I know it’ll return, it won’t be
long,
The hand it’s here, the hand it’s
dead,
The Spiders are playing with my head,
But here’s another, here’s a hider,
They always return, especially the
Spider,
My poem ‘The
Spider’ was inspired by the poem ‘Toad’ by Norman MacCaig. In ‘Toad’ MacCaig
compares a toad to being like a purse and similarily in my poem ‘The Spider’ I
compared a spider to being like a hand by using the refrain- ‘The hand
resembles a Spider, No, the Spider resembles a hand’. By comparing the Spider
to a hand it gives a human type effect to the spider and for the reader makes
it recognisable through imagery. For the first three stanza’s I used a
simplistic a,b,a,b rhyme scheme that makes the poem flow quite well and reflects
the ongoing battle with the spiders that the speaker is facing. As the poem
continues the rhyme scheme becomes less planned to reflect the speakers
defeated and jumbled nature in the spiders appearing. I also took inspiration
from how the poem ‘Toad’ seems to tell a story, with the speaker questioning
the Spider as to how it could just appear in the house and then how the speaker
takes the spider outside to set it out in front of the stars. In my poem it
begins with the speaker noticing the cobwebs and continues to the speaker
eventually killing the spiders in a bid to be free from them. When creating the
poem I used the device we used in class called the ‘Rhyme-Well’ where I begun
by writing a word and expanding out words that rhymed with it, this helped to
find rhyming words as I wanted to use rhyme to help make the poem flow. On
reflection maybe I would focus on the syllables in each line as some lines are
bulkier than others, if I did this and ‘thinned’ it out a little maybe it could
flow easier.
