Summary:

The speaker looks around his sick room. "The tassel of a blind swings constantly." He identifies the room with "the hollow rind of a fruit," where a spider with its legs folded "lies on the dust." In fact, he is the spider.

And what is there outside the window? Only a gray cave "with great spider-cloths hanging / low from the roof." The people he can see are nothing but "spiders with white faces" scuttling around the cave. "Ah, but I am ill, and it is still raining, coldly raining!" [13 lines]

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Summary:

Two men who are not very fond of one another and opposites in almost every way are brought together by their affection for the same woman. Isabel is the 30-year-old wife of Maurice Pervin and the longtime friend of Bertie Reid. While fighting in Flanders during World War I, Maurice is blinded and sustains a disfiguring facial scar. He also has episodes of major depression. Maurice and Isabel have become socially isolated since his injury. Although their first child died in infancy, Isabel is pregnant again and due to deliver soon.

Bertie, a bachelor and barrister, pays a visit. The three of them enjoy dinner together. Afterwards, Maurice becomes restless and leaves the house. When Bertie goes out to check on him, he finds Maurice in the barn. The blind man asks Bertie for permission to touch him. With one hand, Maurice examines Bertie's skull, face, and arm.

He then asks Bertie to touch his useless eyes and awful scar. Without warning, Maurice places his hand on top of Bertie's fingers, which still rest upon the maimed face. The experience is a revelation for both men. Maurice suddenly understands the splendor of friendship while Bertie realizes how much he fears intimacy.

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Summary:

The long journey towards oblivion has begun, the poet announces. "And it is time to go, to bid farewell / to one's own self." He then asks, "Have you built your ship of death, O have you?" Our bodies are dying, we are slipping away piece by piece. The only hope (if it is a hope) for us is to be prepared for death by building a "little ark" and stocking it with the essentials to carry us through "the dark flight down oblivion."

In this way we achieve "quietus." The poet visualizes launching his ship, which has no rudder, upon the sea of death, which has no ports. Yet, after drifting for a long time in darkness, "the little ship wings home" and "the body, like a worn sea-shell / emerges strange and lovely." [106 lines]

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Summary:

Elizabeth, a coal miner's wife, waits anxiously for her husband to return for dinner, concerned for his safety and at the same time angry at the trouble he has made for her by coming home late, and drunk, so often. She ponders their unsatisfactory relationship and tries to keep up appearances with her two young children.

Then word comes that there has been an accident and that her husband has been killed. His body is brought into the house and laid out (undamaged because he died of suffocation). Washing the body with her mother-in-law, she goes through a complex series of reactions, including curiosity, anger, sympathy, forgiveness, and cool appraisal. She sees that the two of them had long ago rejected something deep within the other, and that they had lived utterly separate lives. At the end she is “grateful to death, which restored the truth.”

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