Poem of the Day: ‘A Noiseless Patient Spider’

In 1855, on the publication of the first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Walt Whitman (1819–1892), hailing him “at the beginning of a great career.” While less adulatory readers labeled him a “pretentious ass,” Whitman had this sentence of Emerson’s embossed in gold on the cover of the book’s second edition, a seminal occurrence of the later omnipresence of the back-jacket blurb. Undeniably, Whitman holds a place of significance in the developing tradition of the American poetic voice. His lines in their expansive sprawl hint at the irrepressible energy of the nineteenth-century nation in its adolescence, emerging from the chaos of war to try conclusions at its own frontiers. But although he is credited — or blamed — as the father of American free verse, those sprawling lines exhibit an underlying instinct for craft and cohesion, as today’s Poem of the Day, “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” illustrates. The poem’s two five-line stanzas, though neither rhymed nor strictly metrical, echo the cadences of biblical poetry. They exhibit, as well, a baseline accentual pentameter pulse, to which the lines expand or contract, suggesting the movements of the spider, a figure for the human soul, as it creeps, spins, and launches itself on slender filaments into its own unknown future. A Noiseless Patient Spider by Walt Whitman A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul. ___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘A Noiseless Patient Spider’

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