Leon: The point I think Pound made concerns the scale on which we live. Or as an entomologist friend of mine once described it so aptly--"an ant's biggest perceived problem isn't people--first it's other ants, and usually, after that other insects." And when you think about it --it applies universally--human beings' biggest perceived problem are other people--cats, other cats, etc. The perception on one level--the level of the dragon world, the human world, is always somewhat correct. It excludes a macroscopic outlook. So while to you an ant is either something momentarily interesting to watch, or something annoying to kill--that lone scout out there in the backyard travailing new territory and gathering intelligence, sometimes making it back to the colony with useful information about dragons and other problematic scenarios, sometimes not as it does single combat with scouts from other colonies and faces hazards we can only imagine, that ant is a centaur in its dragon world. I think it safe to assume that something that large and terrible in an ant's world could be thought of as a "dragon". As I said in the earlier post--this is not the only hazard in its dragon world--another being the truest equivalent of dragons, i.e. lizards, some of which are exceedingly fond of ants. I don't think black widows are in active pursuit of ants--the whole scheme of a web-bearing spider is a passive kind of hunt, not unlike a fisherman or trapper. The ant however needs to be wary of these traps just as some of the mythical heroic figures in Pound's poetry needed to avoid hazards--dragons, gorgons, cyclopes, etc. The other alternative is to do intended battle with them, which ants are also capable of doing in very organized and martial way. GAVIN TLeon Surette wrote: > > But Gavin, why does Pound call black widow spiders dragons? I did in > fact speculate that perhaps he meant that ants were small relative to cows > and such like, but that seems a small yield. And are you quite sure that > ants are the usual prey of black widow spiders?