by May Monten

Created on: October 24, 2009

In "A Noiseless Patient Spider," a poem published in 1867 as part of Walt Whitman's masterpiece "Leaves of Grass," the poet discovers that a spider has something to teach him.

In the first stanza, the poet observes the spider. The spider is isolated. It stands on a little promontory, a little piece of rock projecting out into the air, where the space that surrounds it is "vacant" and "vast." Poor little spider, so tiny and alone in the big universe!

It sends filaments, the silky threads that it uses to build its web, out into the vast, vacant space around it. The spider is all alone, and there seems to be nothing around it, yet it keeps on trying to make contact with something outside of itself. This isn't easy. The space is so vast. Yet the spider keeps on trying. It is "patient." It is "noiseless" - it doesn't protest or complain about the difficulty of its task. It doesn't get tired. It just keeps on sending "filament, filament, filament" into the world outside itself.

We might surmise that the spider has an instinctive faith that there is something out there in the vast empty space, that if it keeps on sending out its filaments, eventually one will find a place to land, and the spider can then begin to build its web.

In the second stanza, the poet makes an explicit analogy between the spider and himself. Like the spider, the poet is surrounded by "measureless oceans of space." He, too, wants to make contact with something outside himself.

He, or rather his "soul," throws out a "gossamer thread" (another way of saying a spider filament). The analogy here, I think, is to a sense of yearning. The soul wants to make contact with something in the universe. Just as the spider wants its silken threads to connect with something solid, so the poet's soul wants to connect with "the spheres." The poet wants to create a bridge between himself and something that matters in the vast, vacant universe. There are many ways to interpret "the spheres," the object of the poet's longing. They might be other people, or love, or truth, or beauty, or God.

Perhaps the poems that the poet writes are his filaments, and he writes the poems in order to try to make contact with whatever it is that he seeks.

The "spheres" are hard to find. If you think about how vast space is, and how relatively tiny the planets are, you can see it would take a long time for someone casting about at random in space to land on a planet. Here, the poet seeks to learn a lesson from the spider. The spider is "patient." The spider is "noiseless." The spider keeps on trying, without complaint. So too must the poet keep on trying, keep on writing his poems, until someday his thread will "catch."

You can read the full poem here: A Noiseless Patient Spider

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