Our poem of the week is ‘Daddy-Long-Legs’ by Christopher Reid, from his collection Toys / Tricks / Traps.

In Christopher Reid’s marvellous collection, a schoolboy furtively and thrillingly drops a marble through the top of his desk so that it makes its way in darkness along a complicated chute of books, rulers and rubbish, only to emerge from a hole in the base and be caught deftly in his other hand. The poem is titled ‘Homeric’ and might serve as a clue to the mood and construction of the collection in general, where the poet, now in his seventies, seeks to track down and commune with his much younger self. It is an investigation that tests Wordsworth’s ‘the Child is father of the Man’ by contriving a series of transtemporal encounters between two selves who may now, conceivably, begin to understand each other.

Daddy-Long-Legs

Spider nobody – surely? – could be afraid of,
shy haunter of ceiling corners and skirting boards,
you keep an idling child happily guessing
whether your next scatty dash will be away or towards.

So many many-angled legs to carry or hurry you
through your routine of twitch-driven physical jerks,
brittle but brisk, you elicit affection by being
like a broken toy that, somehow or other, still works.

Copyright © Christopher Reid, 2023. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

Read all our poems of the week.