18 pages • 36 minutes read
A Noiseless Patient Spider
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Themes
The Impossibility of Isolation
Christianity posits that the physical world is a manifestation of the Creator’s power and glory. Whitman, using the urgent (and heretical) theology he read in Emerson’s essays and poetry, seeks to upcycle this Christian notion of oneness with a secular faith in the oneness of the organic world itself. There is nothing in the material universe that does not participate in that grand harmony. The concept of isolation is therefore moot, and the fear of mortality is ironic. Every element of the natural world is part of this energy field. The loss of any individual part, from a grasshopper to a seagull, from a human being to a star, is inconceivably irrelevant. The energy field is sustained despite—not because of—any individual.
For the individual, however, essential oneness without God demands an even greater leap of faith than Judeo-Christianity demanded. The poem here relaxes the grandness of Whitman’s theology by using the image of a spider spinning its web. Whitman draws on the parable teachings of Christ himself, who often used readily available and very domestic images to teach his philosophy: a vine, a lamb, seeds at planting time. However, such a perception is an illusion caused by the anxiety of vulnerability, in a universe in which the comforting notion of a Creator-God had, in just a few decades of scientific breakthroughs and bold philosophical treatises, become suddenly irrelevant for many. Whitman's poem asks readers to have faith, to remember that the soul is connected, that it catches “somewhere” (Line 10) and thus places every individual within its energy, negating isolation.
The Power of the Soul
At the emotional and spiritual center of Whitman’s vision is his certainty about the reality and power of the soul. Culturally, Whitman's vision exists in a late-century world informed by an accidental conspiracy between new-age scientists, radical philosophers, and theologians. These so-called conspirators were willing to reinvigorate Judeo-Christianity by reconceiving its elaborate metaphysics as symbols rather than reality (Noah’s Ark, for instance, as a didactic story about humility and obedience to God’s word rather than a historical event). As part of this cultural context, Whitman's nonchalant assertion of the reality of the soul is radical and controversial in its own way. If 19th-century poetics became increasingly more interested in the body and its sensual reach, the mind and its intellectual breadth, and the heart and its wonderland logic, Whitman returns to a decidedly Medieval mindset by assuming the soul is humanity’s greatest horizon.
The poem dismisses Christian logic, which for two millennia had insisted that the soul is a part of each person, preserving them from the inevitability of death as a portal to something grander. Once through that translation, the soul confronts a just and merciful God who, in turn, determines where that individual soul goes, to salvation or perdition. It is an elaborate and coaxing drama, but one that Whitman finds decidedly threatening, at best a rigged game, at worst a cause for false hopes and hypocrisies.
For Whitman, the soul is not borrowed from God, and human beings are not meant to return it to God untarnished after death. Rather, the soul is like that spider furiously pumping out that intricate webbing that renders ironic the concept of individuality. The poem reconceives the great drama of mortality as a grand shadow show, like one of Whitman’s beloved grand operas, a distraction. It is a lesson not lost on Whitman, who, now edging toward his own death, revisits the optimism and confidence of his earlier verse to remind himself that death is just theater.
The Role of the Poet
“A Noiseless Patient Spider” can be read as a parable for any artist whose commitment to their craft creates objects—paintings, poems, novels, sculptures—that will outlast their creator and, in doing so, connect the artist to countless others. In this reading, the poem offers reassurance to artists who experience obscurity and isolation that the objects they produce defy that sense of living in the margins.
In the ceaselessly toiling spider, the poem offers its image of the artist, particularly one as prolific and productive across as many years (really decades) as Whitman himself. That work—creating, composing, redrafting—is done perforce in isolation, like the spider perched on its promontory surrounded by space that is “vacant, vast” (Line 3). Insignificant, easy to overlook, easy really to ignore, the artist works on. Whitman himself, across his nearly seven decades of productivity, knew the emotional pain of being ignored, his work dismissed as barbaric and careless (up until the Centennial, Whitman was convinced he had failed in his deepest ambition to be the national poet his infant nation needed).
Despite Whitman's occasional doubt about his purpose and ambition, he always believed his verse ensured him a connection to readers who were no longer able to respond to the careful, tidy lines of the more socially and culturally embraced poets. In this reading of the poem, the spider, with its diligent productivity in relative darkness, becomes the workings of the poet’s own soul as it explores the cosmos, crafting in line after line a bridge to others, both who share the poet’s time and those who, stretching centuries into the future (and Whitman’s vision was precisely that grand), would feel the dazzle of connection to this poet. The works of any artist then become like the “gossamer thread” (Line 10) the spider launches forth into the uncertain vastness all around it. Against and across time and space, the spider creates webbing. For Whitman, one of the most prolific writers of his era, who was then approaching his own death, this webbing is the celebratory reminder of the power of the artist to render time ironic, even irrelevant.
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By Walt Whitman
