Carly Simon / Coming Around Again / 1987
Itsy Bitsy Spider
wistful but stubbornly hopeful
Carly Simon splices the nursery rhyme about the persistent spider into the title track's refrain from her own 'Coming Around Again,' turning a children's song into a folk parable about resilience after loss. The result is less a standalone song than a coda or reprise, using the spider's endless climb as a plain-spoken metaphor for romantic and emotional persistence.
resilience cyclical hope romantic disappointment persistence versus fate childhood innocence reframed
Who's speaking
An adult narrator addresses a partner or listener directly, borrowing a child's rhyme to speak about grown-up disappointment and endurance; the voice is sincere rather than ironic, though the nursery-rhyme frame keeps it disarmingly simple.
What happens
The song opens with the nursery rhyme told straight, its cycle of climb-washout-dry-climb repeated almost verbatim three times. Between repetitions, the adult voice breaks in with declarations about believing in love and accepting change, explicitly naming the recurrence as the point. The rhyme fragments into a chant-like repetition of the spider's name, then returns to the full verse one more time with the title phrase echoing underneath it, before dissolving into a wordless, whispered repetition of the spider's name that fades the song out.
How it's built
The structure is built almost entirely on repetition rather than conventional verse-chorus development: the nursery rhyme functions as a recurring refrain, interrupted twice by short adult-voiced bridges that supply the emotional gloss. A middle section strips the lyric down to bare repetition of the subject's name, functioning as a kind of round or incantation, before the final verse layers the title hook underneath the rhyme, making the metaphor explicit, and the outro dissolves into pure repetition and fade.
Section by section
Opening verses
The rhyme is presented almost without alteration, functioning as an extended epigraph before the song's own voice enters. Repeating it twice before any adult commentary arrives lets the listener absorb the cycle on its own terms first.bridge bridge.First bridge ("I believe in love")comm
Craft
- extended metaphor
- The spider's cycle of climbing, being washed out, and climbing again stands in for the narrator's own pattern of romantic setback and renewed hope, mapped without alteration onto the nursery rhyme's literal action.
- intertextuality
- By importing an existing children's rhyme wholesale rather than paraphrasing it, the song borrows the rhyme's built-in familiarity and innocence, letting adult meaning accumulate around lines listeners already know by heart.
- anaphora
- The repeated phrase structure across each rhyme's four lines, and later the bare repetition of the subject's name, reinforces the theme of cyclical return formally as well as lyrically.
- juxtaposition
- Placing plainspoken adult reflections about love and impermanence directly against the sing-song children's verse creates a tonal friction that gives the simple rhyme unexpected emotional weight.
Reading it
The most direct reading treats the spider as an emblem of romantic endurance: setbacks (rain) are inevitable and impersonal, but so is the return of clear weather and renewed effort. A secondary, slightly darker reading notes that the spider never learns or changes course -- it simply repeats the same climb after every washout, which could be read as compulsive repetition rather than triumphant resilience, an undercurrent that fits an album largely concerned with reunions and second chances that may not resolve cleanly.
Context
This piece functions as a reprise/companion to the album's title track "Coming Around Again," written for the film Heartburn and closely associated with the end of Simon's marriage to James Taylor; the nursery-rhyme reprise appears to extend that song's meditation on cyclical hope after personal upheaval, though I'm not certain of the specific production details or sequencing intent behind this particular track.
Listen for
- how the adult bridges interrupt the nursery rhyme's rhythm rather than blending into it
- the shift from full rhyme to bare name-repetition in the middle section
- the layering of the title phrase underneath the final full verse
- the wordless, whispered fade-out and what it does to the song's tone
- the deliberate lack of musical or lyrical resolution, mirroring the rhyme's unbroken cycle
About Carly Simon
Carly Elisabeth Simon is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and author. She rose to fame in the 1970s with a string of hit records; her 13 top 40 U.S.
b. 1943 / United States
Full biography and catalogue