return to the worm image (the brackets he placed
around the word in his notebook suggest that he
was not entirely happy with it), replacing it with
the image of the spider. The spider, and with it
the first version of ‘‘A Noiseless Patient Spider,’’
first appears in a notebook Whitman kept dur-
ing the Civil War. Like the final version, the
early version is in two stanzas. In the first, Whit-
man presents the soul as reaching out for love,
like the spider spinning its web out of itself. The
poem then becomes an expression of the poet’s
yearning for love, with the memory of a moment
when he felt connected to a passing stranger. In
the second stanza he makes a series of exclama-
tions about the existence of a vast, even infinite
love that is unable to find its fulfilment. The
sense conveyed is that of the isolation of the
poet, who offers love but does not find that it is
reciprocated. Curiously, in 1856 in St. Peters-
burg, only a few years before Whitman wrote
this early draft about the soul reaching out in
love like a spider spinning its web, the great Leo
Tolstoy, then a young man of twenty-six, wrote
in his diary (as later quoted inLeo Tolstoy, His
Life and Work: Autobiographical Memoirs, Let-
ters, and Biographical Material, edited by Paul
Birukoff) the following entry: ‘‘A powerful
means to secure happiness in life is—without
any rules—to spin in all directions, like a spider,
a whole web of love and catch in it all that one
can—old women, children, women, and consta-
bles.’’ Tolstoy writes with the facetious confi-
dence of the young, a tone which is absent from
the earnestness of Whitman’s poem, but the
image he chooses is remarkably similar.
Whitman continued to work on this poem,
tightening it and altering its focus. Whereas the
notebook draft uses the wordlovesix times, the
next version, which is almost the final version of
the poem, eliminates the word entirely. Instead,WHITMAN WAS A MAN WHO LONGED FOR
CONNECTION WITH ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING HE
COULD CONCEIVE OF—BIG AND SMALL, ANIMATE
AND APPARENTLY INANIMATE; HE SENSED THE
VASTNESS OF THE HUMAN SELF... AND ITS CAPACITY
TO FEEL A KINSHIP WITH EVERY ATOM IN THE
ENTIRE COSMOS.’’WHAT
DO I READ
NEXT? Whitman’s poem ‘‘Passage to India’’ was
first published in 1871, around the time
that Whitman completed his final version
of ‘‘A Noiseless Patient Spider.’’ It is notable
for Whitman’s confident tone as he contem-
plates the increasing connectedness of every-
thing on earth and the ever-expanding reach
of the soul. It therefore stands in contrast
to the more tentative tone of ‘‘A Noiseless
Patient Spider.’’
A spider is also the subject of Emily Dick-
inson’s poems ‘‘A Spider Sewed at Night’’
and ‘‘The Spider as an Artist,’’ found in
Selected Poems and Letters of Emily Dickinson
(1959) and other collections of Dickinson’s
poems. The second poem is particularly nota-
ble because it presents the spider in an ele-
vated light, as the creator, through its web, of
aworkofart.
Like Whitman, the twentieth-century poet
Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote in German,
often expresses the loneliness of the self and
the desire to reach out and connect to some-
thing vaster than himself that is also, para-
doxically, the essence of his own self.Selected
Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke(1981), trans-
lated and with a commentary by Robert Bly,
is a good place to start reading this some-
times difficult but immensely rewarding poet.
InWalden; or, Life in the Woods, Henry
David Thoreau, the great contemporary of
Emerson and Whitman, meditates on the
two years he spent living in a wooden hut
at Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachu-
setts. He describes feeling the kind of deep
communion with nature that Whitman also
expresses feeling in many of his poems.Wal-
denwas first published in 1854 and is avail-
able in several modern editions.A Noiseless Patient Spider