A Spider sewed at Night by Emily Dickinson

Шил вечером паук
Без свеч вокруг
На своде белых дуг.

Ждёт Дама рюш притом
Иль саван Гном -         
Сам весть извёл брюшком.

Нетленной славой битв
Уловке быть,
Чертами - лик судить.



Всё верно у Дэвида Приста.
И Дама = муха, и Гном-эльф = мотылёк...
Им обоим или рюш на гроб,
или саван куколем в этой паутине.
Вся философия Природы - в последней строфе.
[David Preest:
Emily returns to the Spider of poem 605. Whether
his ‘Arc of White’ or web was intended to be a lady’s
collar or an elf’s grave-clothes, it is impossible to say.
The spider only tells himself – or informs himself
(= the web) out of himself (= his actual body.) As for
his prospect of ‘Immortality,’ all he can do is to study
the face of the web which he has made, the primary meaning
of ‘physiognomy’ in Emily’s day being ‘the foretelling
future destiny from the features of the face.’ But in
poem 605 Emily used the Spider as a picture of herself
writing poems, and so also in this poem. For she often
wrote at night and with little light. She herself
could best say what her poems meant. And her ‘Strategy’
for ascertaining the prospects of ‘Immortality’ was to
study the face of Nature. Charles Anderson points out how
these three stanzas, each of three rhyming lines, with
the homely vocabulary of the first two stanzas turning
philosophical in the third, are as condensed
and organised as the spider’s web itself.]

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A Spider sewed at Night by Emily Dickinson

A Spider sewed at Night   
Without a Light          
Upon an Arc of White.    

If Ruff it was of Dame   
Or Shroud of Gnome            
Himself himself inform.   

Of Immortality          
His Strategy             
Was Physiognomy.