A Noiseless Patient Spider

The form is prototypical Whitman—that is, entirely like Whitman and entirely unlike any other poetry of his era. At first read, there is a stabilizing form: two five-line stanzas (called quintains), each stanza actually a single sentence, separated by function—the first centered on the spider, the other an explication of that image. The lines themselves, however, defy expectations. They develop their argument according to the argument itself. In the opening stanza, about the spider and its web, the tidy lines match the relatively narrow range of the image. In the second stanza, when the poem celebrates the reach of the soul into the cosmos itself, the lines explode, reflecting that feverish energy. The lines are longer, sinewy, and tensile like the “ductile anchor” (Line 9), the rich webbing the soul sends out.

Thus, the poem is not so much free verse—that suggests chaos and carelessness—but rather organic verse. In truth, Whitman’s unconventional message of the immanence of eternity and the essential connectivity of all elements of the cosmos could hardly be contained, much less expressed, in traditional, conventional poetic forms. Even as the noiseless, patient spider sends reels and reels of filament out in the universe, busting through the apparent smallness of its frame and the insignificance of its actions, the poet himself proclaims his own position in the cosmos, the reward of his constant restless questioning and his refusal to accept the status quo in poetic form that reflects that empowerment.