Elise Partridge was born in 1959, and published Caught in her collection, Fielder’s Choice, in 2002. I love Caught because of its use of visual imagery to tell a simple story Partridge uses five line stanzas, quintains, in her poem. The rhyming scheme only repeats on the first and fifth line of each quintain. Caught is a simple poem. It involves a fly who gets stuck in part of a spider’s web. The poem manages to make the fly feel less like prey and more like the victim of an unfortunate accident, since the web it gets caught in has been abandoned by the spider that spun it. The fly attempts to escape, but only succeeds in making the situation worse. The imagery in Caught is minimal, but fantastic. Partridge’s ability to conjure up images of a struggling fly, a ruined web, and a skittering spider is wonderful, and the simple theme of nature works well.
My favorite part of Caught has to be in the first quintain, where the fly’s wing has been snagged on the web and its legs are running on thin air.
He ran his six legs through thin air
like a cartoon character,
wrenching
his abdomen to his jerking head. (2-5)
This scene adds humor to the poem and gives the fly just enough personification for the reader to care about what happens to it.
In Caught, Partridge uses choice words to personify the hapless fly; wrenching and flailing, as well as comparing it to a cartoon character and a trapeze artist. I love this about Caught because these words make the fly’s plight relatable, as the spider has moved away, and the fly is now stuck in the remains of a ruined web. Even through Caught deals with a fly’s problems, I personally find myself stuck in a web of problems each day and find that I can figuratively place myself in the fly’s six legs from that perspective.
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