The Orb Weaver is Robert Francis's fifth book of poems. The attitude, style and tone are much the same as they were in 1938. His world is rural New England, but not a New England which has undergone any significant changes during the past twenty-five years. It is a world of personal observations made within a quiet, peaceful, static environment walled off from the loud, blaring events of Mr. Auden's "age of anxiety."

Though Mr. Francis lacks the gritty muscularity of Robert Frost, he can stand side by side with the elder poet as an exponent of pantheistic serenity. (p. 109)

Mr. Francis seems to favor a loose blank verse, a "Freedom that flows in form and still is free" is what he calls it in an earlier book in a poem about seagulls. Not even the most impatient reader could register a charge of obscurity against these poems. The author himself has said,

         Words of a poem should be glass
         But glass so simple-subtle its shape
         Is nothing but the shape of what it holds.

Like Frost, Mr. Francis is a type of bucolic philosopher with which we are all familiar, who translates the wisdom of nature into a means for achieving human contentment. (p. 110)