The Cool Web Language and Communication Quotes

At this point, Graves makes a direct connection between his theory of language and the "cool web" that he mentions in the poem's title. He basically claims that we humans are caught up in language like flies caught in a spider's web. Language is like a network of words that also exists inside our heads and allows us to relate different experiences to one another according to stuff like themes and concepts. In this sense, we are caught in language to the extent that our experience only "makes sense" if we can put it into words. Anything that can't be expressed in words tends not to count for other people.

Toward the end of the poem, Graves starts to wonder aloud what would happen if humans were able to leave language behind and to experience the world in a totally unfiltered way. In this sense, we'd be able to throw off the "watery clasp" of language, meaning that language is something that imprisons us.

But just when Graves starts wondering about how we might liberate our minds and experience the world directly, he ends by claiming that we'd go mad and die if we started experiencing the world with no language at all. After all, we might not even have self-consciousness without language. We'd have no way of making sense of our experience, and we'd probably just lose our minds and die, since we wouldn't be able to take care of ourselves.