In the United States, the tradition goes back
at least far as the New England minister Edward
Taylor (1642–1729), whose poem ‘‘Upon a Wasp
Chilled with Cold’’ is, as its title suggests, a med-
itation on the fortunes of a wasp in winter. Tay-
lor observes and describes the wasp just as
carefully as Whitman does his spider. The cold
wasp attempts to warm herself in the winter sun,
as if she has made a deliberate and rational
decision that this would be a wise thing to do.
The wasp is thankful for the opportunity and
then flies back to her nest. In the second, con-
cluding stanza, Taylor addresses God, asking
that he, the poet, might emulate the wasp, from
which he has learned the lesson to act out his
own part in life in a similarly rational and thank-
ful manner, that he might ascend to God, like the
wasp to her nest. A similar attitude to objects of
nature is found in the sermons of the revivalist
preacher Jonathan Edwards of the eighteenth
century. In his notebook entry under the title
of ‘‘Images or Shadows of Divine Things,’’
Edwards takes various natural phenomena—
roses, hills, mountains, rivers, trees—and shows
how each provides lessons about the spiritual
life. Trees, for example, are an emblem of Christ
(the trunk) and his church (the branches). The
natural tradition appears again in the poetry of
Whitman’s contemporaries, notably Holmes, in
‘‘The Chambered Nautilus’’ (1858), and Bryant,
in ‘‘To a Waterfowl’’ (1821).
Underlying nearly all such poetry and prose
is the belief not only that nature offers opportu-
nities to humans to reflect on spiritual truths
but furthermore that all things in nature are
designed and created by an intelligent, benevo-
lent God and are therefore perfectly adapted for
all tasks performed. This worldview formed one
of the traditional arguments for the existence of
God. InNatural Theology(1802), for example,
the English clergyman William Paley tried to
prove that the intricate design of nature demon-
strated the existence of a cosmic designer. Paley
included spiders in his demonstration of how the
wisdom of God is manifested in his creation: The
spider feeds on insects that can fly, but the spider
cannot fly, which would appear to put it at a
disadvantage. However, God in his wisdom has
given the spider the ability to spin an adhesive
web that will catch the fly. (Paley does not com-
ment on why God has not also endowed the fly
with the ability to avoid or escape from the
spider’s web.) Paley also notes that the spider
has been given eight eyes, which enable it to see
every view possible (which rather puts in mind
Whitman’s ‘‘soul’’ in ‘‘A Noiseless Patient Spi-
der,’’ which, as analogous to the spider, is able to
cast around in all directions in the universe in
order to make some connection).Critical Overview.
‘‘A Noiseless Patient Spider’’ has attracted a fair
amount of attention from literary critics. Mark
Van Doren, in hisIntroduction to Poetry, empha-
sizes the lonely stance of the poet: ‘‘Here is sol-
itude with a vengeance, in vacancy so vast that
any soul seen at its center, trying to comprehend
and inhabit it, looks terribly minute.’’ But Van
Doren argues that the ‘‘rolling energy of the
verse by its own might’’ seems to promise that
the soul will make the connection it so much
desires. E. Fred Carlisle, however, reaches the
opposite conclusion inThe Uncertain Self: Whit-
man’s Drama of Identity: ‘‘The poem offers no
assurance that spiders or souls, after enduring a
period of isolation and loneliness, will inevitably
succeed in bridging the vast spaces separating
each from some other.’’
In his bookWalt Whitman, James E. Miller,
Jr., notes that the poem is included in the section
‘‘Whispers of Heavenly Death,’’ ‘‘suggesting that
it deals not only with human relationships, but
also with the relationship to divinity in both life
and death—the recurring theme of the cluster.’’
Luke Mancuso, in his entry on the 1871–1872
edition ofLeaves of GrassinWalt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, interprets the ‘‘soul’’ in Whitman’s
poem to refer to the soul of the American nation,
suggesting that the spider ‘‘represents a compel-
ling emblem for the Reconstruction poet, though
apparently isolated and casting filaments into
an unpromising future, who will continue to
desire to connect the present social turmoil to
the unwritten national future.’’ M. Jimmie Kill-
ingsworth takes a different approach inWalt
Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics,
considering the poem in light of the figure of
Spider Woman in the mythology of the Pueblo
Indians, who is depicted ‘‘not only as the creator
of the world but as the original storyteller who
weaves and spins and makes living connections
among the organic and inorganic elements of
the world, animating the inanimate, enchanting
the earth.’’ Killingsworth sees the speaker in theA Noiseless Patient Spider