was hot and still. The tide was out. / No birds sang.” And, after becoming entangled with the web, the speaker says: “There was no wind. The sea / was dead calm.” However, rather than commenting on the idea of nothingness and death that the images suggest, the speaker takes action, hanging the web from a lampshade and watching “it shudder now and then when my breath / touches it. A fine thread. Intricate.” These descriptions are both literal, that is, they accurately describe the physical attributes of the web and the speaker’s actions, and figurative, in that they also describe the nature of human life. But Carver does not use metaphor to accomplish this; he does not write, “My life is a cobweb, fine and intricate.” Rather, he employs a stacking strategy, letting the images accrue meaning as he places them near one another. In this way, the images become symbolic; even though the surface of Carver’s poem is realistic, the undercurrent resonates with other meaning. In his essay “On Writing,” inFires, Carver writes:

It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring—with immense, even startling power.

Although it is what Carver does not say that makes “The Cobweb” successful, it is also what he does say, particularly in the last two lines of the poem, that makes the poem poignant. For whereas the description of the speaker’s encounter with the cobweb is a relatively commonplace occurrence, the speaker’s realization of his own impending death is surprising. It is this leap between the description of the event and the insight it engenders that is so characteristic of Carver’s style and vision. The last image, of the speaker breathing on the web under the light, is a perfect lead-in to the last two lines, as it employs the symbolic imagery of light and breath to underscore the fragility of life.

In his essay “On Bobber and Other Poems,” included in his collection of uncollected prose and fiction, Call If You Need Me, Carver writes that he remembers the occasion surrounding the writing of his poems better than those surrounding his stories: I feel the poems are closer to me, more special, more of a gift received than my other work, even though I know, for sure, that the stories are no less a gift. It could be that I put a more intimate value finally on the poems than I do the stories.

Carver acknowledges, as do many other writers about their own work, that although there are autobiographical elements in his poems and that they spring from specific occasions, they are not literal renderings of those occasions. Rather, he takes the raw material from which the poem arises and shapes it to fit the emotional truth from which it springs. Carver’s “vision” is deeply tied to his notions of poetry’s purpose. “They are always about something,” he writes, adding that when he reads over his poems, he is “looking back over a rough, but true map of my past.” Carver’s poems, however, are more than simply chronicles of his own past; they also comment on the human condition, on how one person’s life and pain illustrate many people’s lives and pain.

Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “The Cobweb,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2003. Semansky is an instructor of literature and composition.

Carver was a man with much to celebrate and much to regret. Perhaps more than any other American writer since Hemingway, his life story is legendary: born in an Oregon mining town, Carver grew up in a blue-collar family in the American West, with big dreams of making it as an author. But, marriage at age nineteen, and the birth of his first daughter six months later, put those dreams on hold. By the time he was 20, Carver was a father of two and struggling to support his family while beginning his education as a freshman at California’s Chico State University. His course of study in creative writing did pay off, with a number of early publications in small but significant “little magazines” and a growing literary reputation. By the time his first book of stories appeared in 1976, alcoholism had largely destroyed both his fifteenyear marriage and his writing.

Unlike so many stories with similar openings, Carver’s does not end there, but continues, with both personal and professional redemption. In 1977, spurred on by the offer of a book contract from McGraw-Hill, Carver quit drinking, for good. Five months later, at a writer’s conference, he met Tess Gallagher, a poet who would be a life companion and a significant stabilizing influence for the next ten years—and, finally, his second wife.

Sober, Carver set to work on a body of short stories that established him as a master of that craft in the second half of the twentieth century. Although his poems are less well known than his short stories, he also devoted a great deal of energy to them. In fact, his first published book was not of short stories, but poems, and he joked once that it would be enough for him if, on his gravestone, his loved ones simply engraved “Poet.” Carver’s stories are known for their spare focus on one perfectly- drawn subject, but his poems, while they share simplicity of language with his prose, were more clearly autobiographical, often with somewhat larger scope. In “The Cobweb,” which was published originally in Ultramarine (1986), a book that Carver completed after a trip to South America with Gallagher, he looks back on his life.

One of the distinctive points of Carver’s prose is the indirect nature with which he approaches his subjects; in Carver’s work, revelation tends to sneak up on both characters and reader from nowhere, often when they least expect it. The same thing is true in “The Cobweb.” In the poem, the speaker has gone out “onto the deck / of the house,” where he can see and hear “the water,” which he might expect. But, the next line changes the stakes dramatically, adding that, along with the water, the speaker can also see “everything that’s happened to me all these years.” This line has a powerful effect on the reader, operating very much like the memories that sometimes rush in on people when they least expect them—often in quiet moments like the one that the speaker has been describing. It is not clear from the poem whether the speaker is surprised. The first three lines leave room for interpretation: the memories may have come unbidden, or the speaker may have gone out of the house looking for them, intentionally. One possible reading, in light of Carver’s recent trip to South America, which strongly influenced other parts of Ultramarine, is that Carver’s distance from his homeland (for which stepping “onto the deck of the house” might be a metaphor) allowed him a new vantage point from which to write about someone looking back over his life.

Whether the speaker is surprised or has sought the vision deliberately, he holds steady, avoiding directly describing the very thing that the reader now wants to see: the “everything” of his life that has spread out before him. The general sense of the description he does give is of loss and helplessness: “It was hot and still. The tide was out. / No birds sang.” In these lines, the tide and birds, the only two physical objects that Carver mentions, are both absent; they are things that used to be there, and now are not. Both are also forces of nature that are notoriously outside of man’s control. Behind them, they have left nothing but silence. In this landscape of water and memory, the speaker is the only thing moving, and only barely, as if trying to make it out of the room without waking anybody. If he is careful, he might make it out clean.

But that is not to be. As the speaker leans against the railing (perhaps for support, perhaps to get a better look), a cobweb touches his forehead—the first action by anything other than the speaker in the entire poem to this point. The cobweb is a familiar symbol—from high art to Halloween decorations, it appears as a sign of things forgotten or left behind. In its association with spiders, the cobweb is somewhat threatening. The one the speaker brushes against is inescapable: no sooner has it touched his forehead than it becomes caught in his hair.

The past that the speaker has been gazing out upon has suddenly crept up onto the deck, and quite literally, caught the speaker in its web. In response, Carver offers the first statement of opinion in a poem which, until this point, has been entirely description. “No one can blame me,” he says, “that I turned and went inside.” In his denial of anyone’s right to blame him, the speaker implies that someone might, admitting at least the possibility of his guilt in turning away. Carver adds two more lines of description, as if to give the speaker a defense, further images of absence and silence: “There was no wind. The sea / was dead calm.” There was nothing, really, out there to see, Carver seems to say. Why should anyone blame the speaker for turning away?

By this point, however, caught by the cobweb, the speaker cannot escape. The two lines of description in the speaker’s defense also serve to point out the fact that, even after he goes inside, nothing changes. His past, in the form of the cobweb, has followed him in. In fact, the shift between Carver’s initial description of the speaker’s life as something he can look down on from the deck, and its later incarnation as the cobweb may be significant. The shift may constitute an admission on the speaker’s part that, while he wishes the past were something he could remain detached from, it is actually far more like the cobweb: unavoidable, clinging.

The fact that the speaker cannot loose himself from the cobweb forces him, finally, to look directly at it. Deliberately, he settles the cobweb on the lampshade, where he will “watch it shudder” under his breath as if it has some life of its own— as opposed to the “everything that’s happened to me” of the early part of the poem, which the speaker can only “see.” Again, even inside, the speaker is the only thing that is moving, and again, his movements are minimal. They have a profound effect on the cobweb, which “shudders” now and then, when the speaker’s breath “touches it.” Interestingly, in a poem in which both movement and word choice are extremely constrained, Carver uses “touch” again, linking the current action of the speaker’s breath against the cobweb back to the initial contact of the cobweb against the speaker’s forehead: the pattern of his life has affected him, seemingly without his permission, but he also can affect it. On an even deeper level, Carver may be commenting on the role memory plays in reshaping the events of a person’s life as they appear in his mind. The cobweb—which now represents everything that has happened to the speaker—does not come to pieces, but the speaker’s presence does disturb it.

In fact, the cobweb as a symbol of the past even offers some hope for the future. Although Carver begins the poem with profound feelings of emptiness and stasis associated with the past, by the end, after it touches the speaker (whether the speaker allows it or it clings to him unbidden), he is able to remove it from his person, looking clearly at it, and in that way he still affects it. In carrying the cobweb, the speaker succeeds in preserving his history, and therefore his essence, even as he crosses boundaries from one space or phase of life to the next. Finally, although the cobweb at first made him turn away from the view of his life that he commanded from the deck, Carver pronounces his judgement of the cobweb as positive: “A fine thread. Intricate.”

Then, jarringly, Carver closes the poem with what sounds like a threat: “Before long, before anyone realizes / I’ll be gone from here.” Is the speaker unhappy with the life he has created? Is he simply unable, despite the steps he has taken over the course of the poem, to really look directly at “everything that’s happened” for long? Or, is he predicting yet another transformation in his life, one so profound that he will leave the emptiness and silence of his past life behind for another life completely? Good arguments could be made for any of these interpretations, but the most obvious, and probably best reading of the final lines of “The Cobweb” is that, in them, the speaker predicts his own death.

Along with the warning that he will be gone soon, Carver offers a final lesson, the same one that he teaches again and again through the indirect way he reveals truth in both his poems and prose. When truth arrives in Carver’s work, it is revealed indirectly, when least expected. With the line “before anyone realizes / I’ll be gone from here,” he contends that death will not be any different. It will arrive just like a sudden rush of memories and will be as impossible to escape as an unnoticed cobweb, which first brushes against one’s forehead, then catches in one’s hair.

Still, Carver’s poem is not hopeless. In the lines just before the final lines, he has pronounced the pattern of the speaker’s life, in the form of the cobweb to be, in his estimation, “fine” and “intricate.” The final sense of “The Cobweb” is that the speaker, although deeply ambivalent about some of his past, is pleased with the entire pattern.

Source: Carey Wallace, Critical Essay on “The Cobweb,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2003. Wallace is a freelance writer and poet.

Carver is perhaps more known for his collections of short stories rather than his poems. However, his third volume of poetry, Ultramarine was published in 1986 and received critical acclaim. This anthology conveys themes of love, nature, gratitude, and death using free verse poems about seemingly simple objects and moments in time. While the volume contains vibrant, rich, and healing poems, “The Cobweb” illustrates Carver reflecting on his imminent death. Instead of sadness, “The Cobweb” conveys a meditative quality. Carver’s style of using few words to convey a depth of meaning keeps the poem from sounding morbid or melancholy. Critics often describe Carver as a minimalist who creates art out of everyday experiences. Adam Meyer notes in his book, Raymond Carver, that Carver learned to use the language of common people and to eliminate unnecessary verbiage early in his career. Carver uses the poem “The Cobweb” as an invitation to reflect on one’s life. The poem is also an example of Carver’s unique writing style. While sparse, Carver’s writing is not unsophisticated. Roxanne Lawler’s article, “Carver’s World,” in Conversations with Raymond Carver, quotes Carver describing his writing this way, “I place a high premium on clarity and simplicity, not simplemindedness— which is quite different.”

Carver was born in 1938 in Clatskanie, Oregon to working class parents. During Carver’s formative years, the family moved frequently and worked hard just to make ends meet. The situation was made worse by Carver’s father’s addiction to alcohol. At nineteen, Carver married his sixteenyear- old, pregnant, high school sweetheart, Maryann Burk. By the time he was 20, Carver was supporting his wife and two children, finishing college, and finding work as a writer. Financial hardships and marital strife took their toll on Carver and he soon followed in his father’s footsteps of alcohol abuse. Despite these setbacks, Carver continued to write and was critically acclaimed for both his poetry and short stories. He also continued to drink heavily, and he was hospitalized several times for acute alcoholism. Carver and his wife separated several times and eventually divorced.

On June 2, 1977, Carver took his last drink. In the days leading up to his decision to quit drinking, Carver felt he had hit rock–bottom. Bruce Weber’s article, “Raymond Carver: A Chronicler of Blue Collar Despair,” in, Conversations with Raymond Carver, edited by Marshall Bruce Gentry and William Stull, quotes Carver as saying,

For all intents and purposes, I was finished as a writer and as a viable, functioning male. It was over for me. That’s why I can speak of two lives, that life and this life.

Carver saw that June day as a dividing line between his two very different lives, lives that were separate but entwined—much like a cobweb is made of entwined, silken fibers. Carver did not forget his earlier, alcoholic life; he overcame it. Later in 1979, Carver began living with the poet Tess Gallagher. They married in 1988. Unfortunately, Carver’s happiness was short-lived. He died of lung cancer in 1988.

It was during Carver’s second life that he was able to write the poems in Ultramarine. “These poems expressed, among other things, a thankfulness even for his trials, and for having been delivered into a life he considered happy,” says Tess Gallagher in the forward to All of Us. While the poems in Ultramarine are more upbeat than in previous collections, Carver’s style of employing common objects and everyday situations to explain deeper meanings is still evident. The simple elements of water, a cobweb, a lampshade, and a human breath are woven together to create a thoughtful poem about the complexities of life, death, and human relationships.

Written before he was diagnosed with cancer, Carver uses the poem “The Cobweb” to ponder life and his own eventual death. The speaker of the poem steps out to the deck of his house to: “see and hear the water, / and everything that’s happened to me all these years.” This unassuming moment of watching water is infused with the significance of reflection on one’s life. Carver goes on to simply describe what the speaker sees and feels and hears: “It was hot and still. The tide was out. / No birds sang.” Through his spare, but descriptive text, Carver invites the reader to stop and enter this moment of time on a hot, still, quiet day, a calm moment where there is no movement. A moment made for reflection. As Stephen Dobyns writes in Randolph Runyon’s book Reading Raymond Carver

“I can think of no contemporary American poet who could locate this sort of small yet intensely emotional moment as well as Ray could. They are the moments we mostly don’t have time for. Unfortunately, they are also the moments that give life its significance.”

Carver goes on to tell the reader: “As I leaned against the railing / a cobweb touched my forehead. It caught my hair.” Cobwebs are the stuff of spiders, dirt and decay. Now, one is stuck in the speaker’s hair. Readers are mesmerized. Carver uses this cobweb to bring tension to the poem. It gives the reader a vivid and ironic picture of the speaker standing on a windless day overlooking a “dead calm” sea with a cobweb on his hair. As Michael Schumacher writes in his article, “After the Fire, Into the Fire: An Interview with Raymond Carver” in Conversations with Raymond Carver, edited by Marshall Bruce Gentry and William Stull, “Carver’s poems are dynamic and compressed, with each word a carefully chosen tool used to stretch tension to near-breaking point.”

Instead of brushing the cobweb from his head, the speaker welcomes it. He does not shy away from this dusty, dirty bundle as it clings to his hair. Instead, he carefully walks inside and hangs the cobweb from a lampshade, “Where [he] watch[es] it shudder now and then when [his] breath touches it.” Carver turns this simple cobweb into a metaphor for the speaker’s life. While a cobweb is often seen as a distasteful thing, like drinking, the speaker does not destroy it. He gently moves it to a place of safety; a place where he continues to reflect on this cobweb of his life. Carver often spoke of his two separate lives, and while he found happiness in his second life, he never shied away from the memories of his first life. He carried those experiences with him and used them to shape his later poems and short stories. In her New York Times Book Review of Ultramarine, Patricia Hampl writes of Carver, “He has the astonished, chastened voice of a person who has survived a wreck, as surprised that he had a life before as that he has a life afterward; willing to remember both sides.”

A cobweb entangles, obscures, or confuses. In his poem, Carver describes the cobweb as “A fine thread. Intricate.” Again, Carver gives us another view of this seemingly simple cobweb. No longer does the reader see this as a dusty, decaying bundle, but as a complex weaving of delicate strands. People’s lives are like that—woven over time. Del- icate strands link people to experiences and relationships. Through his description of the cobweb, Carver illustrates how tenuous these connections are that link people to relationships with others. These relationships can confuse and entangle. People can get caught up in the cobwebs of their own lives.

The last lines of “The Cobweb” are direct and get to the heart of this poem: “Before long, before anyone realizes, / I’ll be gone from here.” The speaker is contemplating his own death. While dramatic, these lines do not convey a sense of dread or of panic. They have a meditative quality. Carver’s unaffected words are calming as the speaker reflects on his life in this quiet moment. “He was the celebrator of those small occasions of fragile contentment, of time lived instead of time passing,” says Stephen Dobyns in Runyon’s Reading Raymond Carver. Even though this poem speaks of death, Carver’s use of language imparts an air of solemnity, not sadness. Carver invites the reader to reflect on the complexities of life as the speaker’s breath expands and contracts the fragile cobweb.

Carver’s direct but descriptive language and subject matter invite readers of all backgrounds to examine his poems. He writes of everyday things: going to get groceries, his car, mail, and getting cobwebs caught in one’s hair, but the meditative quality of these poems invites the reader to examine their deeper meaning. Again, Stephen Dobyns reflects on Carver’s poems in Runyon’s Reading Raymond Carver: “They are not a critic’s poems. They are not decorative. They need no one to interpret them. They are a reader’s poems. They exist to define moments of emotion and wonder.” Through its simple phrasing and modest descriptions, “The Cobweb’’ shows the reader a wonderful snapshot of Carver’s unaffected style. A style that appears simple on the surface but is never simple-minded in its depth of meaning.

Source: Tamara Sakuda, Critical Essay on “The Cobweb,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2003. Sakuda holds a bachelor of arts degree in communications and is an independent writer.