Taylor

The fly is caught in the web, along with a wasp. The fly's struggles simply transmit its location to the spider, who quickly overpowers and destroys the hopeless victim. The fly represents everyone who is not a wasp; the non-believer, the misled Christian, the Catholic, or the savage. Powerless against the devil, these creatures quickly fall prey without hope of rescue. Taylor shows that the wasp is a threat to the spider, while the fly is easier to trap and seize.

The devil, which is the spider, will get the fly, which represents a man that is not an elect. This stanza is a transition, it is in the middle of the poem and it transitions one thought to another; one comparison to another. The insects represents humankind. The spider's web of sin cleverly entangles the insects. The insects cannot escape, but the Elect has a chance to be escaped.

In the final two stanzas, the elect are the ones who are disentangled and free. God will protect the man who is an elect. In the last stanza, Taylor shifts to a description of the safety of the Elect, changing his metaphor in the process. He employs a metaphor of the Elect as a sweetly singing nightingale, safety protected from the outside world "in glory's cage" (line 48).

Taylor's other poem, "Preface to God's Determinations Touching His Elect," is similar to this poem. They both show the Puritan belief of the Elect and that the Puritans also believed that God decided that you were going to heaven or hell, called Preordination. They both compare this situation with a conceit, and the theme are similar.

The form of Taylor's poem is a lyrical poem with standard punctuation and capitalization on important words. It has ABABB rhyme scheme, also with some slant rhyme. In this poem, the iamb of each stanza changes. The first line of the stanza has six beats, then four, eight, four, and then two beats. This goes on in each