A Noiseless Patient Spider

From a mid-19th-century perspective, it is difficult to determine what is more terrifying: space, or time. The so-called Gilded Age was a new era of bold and aggressive scientific inquiry that raised disturbing, even unsettling questions about both space and time. After two millennia, Judeo-Christianity began evolving into a social convention, and worship itself into a community ritual. Moreover, the de/reconstruction of the material universe into inconceivable vastness itself shifted perspective: A lifetime suddenly seemed precariously narrow, with no promise of an afterlife.

Whitman addresses new dimensions of individual vulnerability by using the familiar image of a spider spinning out a web, an image that in any other circumstance would either be a nuisance to be cleaned away or a trivial event all too easy to ignore. Like religious figures since Antiquity, Whitman avails himself of an object his readers would readily recognize to teach readers that their soul connects them to the wider world despite the unknowns of time and space.

The poem uses the image of an insignificant spider shooting out filaments that defy space by connecting the spider to the “vast, vacant surrounding” (Line 3). Like Whitman’s EveryPerson (or perhaps EverySoul would be more accurate), the spider cannot possibly know exactly to where he shoots the “filament, filament, filament out of itself” (Line 4).