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Sounding Childhood Main Menu Part 1: Children's Hymns Part 2: Songs for School and Play Part 3: Animal Welfare (Bands of Mercy) Songs Part 4: Christmas Carols Part 5: Folk Songs Part 6: Patriotic Songs Part 7: Early 20th-Century Hymns About the Author Works Cited

The Spider score

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"The Spider" Alisa Clapp-Itnyre
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The Spider Once again, I took advantage of the animals sung about in Bands of Mercy songs, and used "The Spider" to honor Charlotte herself by our 2020 Bands of Mercy choir for the show Charlotte's Web.

Indeed, The Band of Mercy Advocate honored other creatures’ lives their pages, such as (No. 23, Vol. 2), words by John Saffery, music by T. Crampton):
Oh, go, thou little spider, travel bravely on thy way;
The world is surely large enough for you and me today.
Thy impulse of a moment would deprive thee of thy life,
And monster hands too swiftly crush thy frame with beauty rife (v. 1)
It also comments on how “wondrous are thy life and ways, and wondrously devised. Go, spin gossamer, to float upon the air” (v. 2). This text and the tune, in moving eighth notes up and down the scale like a spider moving amongst its web, both honor the unrecognized “beauty” and “ways” of the spider and its right simply to live and spin, the song flips the Chain of Being on end with humans now the unchristian “monster” who kill and maim.