Ted Hughes positioned “Spider” as a 1956 poem, but the evidence suggests it may have been written in 1958. In the poem, Plath references the African folklore tale of Anansi, the trickster spider. Hughes noted in The Collected Poems that by the end of the year 1956 she had become greatly interested in African folklore, and he cited in  his book Winter Pollen the “explosive transformation that author Paul Radin’s African collection worked on the poetry of Sylvia Plath” (WP, 78).  

In January 4, 1958, Plath herself wrote of reading “myths & folktales & poetry & anthropology” (UJ, 306). From this point, folklore shows up creating another level of understanding to much of her work.

While undated, the “Spider” poem’s line, “Last summer I came upon your Spanish cousin” sets the poem after Plath and Hughes’ honeymoon in Benidorm, which happened in July 1956.  Plath had not been to Spain before then. In her journal on June 26, 1958, Plath wrote about “the black spider in Spain knotting ants around its rock,” and if one believes that her diary entry inspired the poem, then she wrote this poem in late June 1958 (UJ, 398), almost two years after her honeymoon. This seems to be in conflict with a statement Plath made a month later in her journals on July 27, 1958, when she wrote about having just composed two new Benidorm poems, a subject that had been “closed” to her until then. Plath also wrote in January of 1959 of wanting to do a series of Cambridge and Benidorm poems, but this did not seem to happen (UJ, 466). She called her new poems “deeper, more sobre, sombre (yet well colored) than any” she had done before (UJ, 410).  These comments make “Spider” and her other poem, “The Goring,” likely candidates to have been written in 1958, not in 1956 where they are placed by Hughes in The Collected Poems. However, with the “Last summer” reference, it is also possible that Plath wrote “Spider” toward the end of 1956 and had simply forgotten that she wrote the poem.  

The year makes no difference. Plath’s “Spider” celebrates the great baseball player Willie Mays, who in 1956 hit 36 home runs and stole 40 bases. Whether looking at 1956, 1957, or 1958, Willie Mays remained an MVP in baseball. Mays was, in Plath-speak, a “black busybody of the folktales,” right behind Jackie Robinson. Why would Plath know or care about baseball? In 1953, she had been romantically involved with a professional ballplayer for the Detroit Tigers, Myron “Mike” Lotz. Plath’s hometown of Boston is known to take baseball very seriously, and Mays played for the neighboring New York Giants, and later, the New York Mets.[1]

Plath’s “Spider” is loaded with baseball words and metaphor: Willie Mays could field (“squint from center field”), hit “As a sledge hammer,” and run the bases (“nimble filament” and “each time round”) better than almost anyone. The summer season of baseball is named in the second stanza, and Mays had first become a star playing with the Black Barons in the Negro League (Plath’s “baron”). Plath notes the “Spanish cousin” of the prior summer, and that summer of 1955 was when Joe DiMaggio, called “Dago” by teammates, was accepted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. “Dago” is a colloquialism for an Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese-speaking person. By the time of this poem, DiMaggio had already had a short marriage to Hollywood legend, Marilyn Monroe, another celebrity Plath admired.[2]

The MacGregor baseball glove Mays used in the New York Giants was called a “spider web glove,” appropriate to the poem’s name, and Plath’s “gray spool of stone” is home base. Mays outhit, outfielded, and outran everyone to the point it was nearly “Appalling to witness” […]“His next martyr to the gross cause.”

The baseball stadium is Plath’s “altar tiered” and the ants are the small players and fans, when viewed from a distance or on television. They are “a file of comers, a file of goers.” Plath sees the team players and bases as a “small stonehenge.” As the players touch base, Plath’s “caught ants waved legs in.” Mays is a “spry black deus” (god) in the machine (“Ex machine”) of baseball. In mid-1950s American professional baseball, race began to mean nothing in the face of great talent, “Nor did they seem deterred by this.”

“Spider” may have first been inspired by a line of ants and a spider that Plath and Hughes observed in Benidorm, but once one is aware of Plath’s layering of meanings, this is an extremely limited interpretation (UJ, 255-256).

[1] Willie Howard Mays, Jr., born 1931, is a retired American professional baseball player who spent the majority of his Major League Baseball career as a center fielder with the New York and San Francisco Giants before finishing with the New York Mets. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979, his first year of eligibility.

[2] Sylvia Plath’s letters and journals have several references to Marilyn Monroe. See Carl Rollyson’s book, American Isis: the life and art of Sylvia Plath (2013, St. Martin’s Press) for more.