the soul now seeks an unspecified connection
with the vastness of its environment. This ver-
sion of the poem was the first one published—in
theBroadway: A London Magazinein October
- It is almost the same as the final version
but contains far more caesuras, or breaks. The
second line of the first stanza has four commas in
it, in addition to the final semicolon; in the final
version Whitman would remove all of these, to
give the line an unbroken flow. He did the same
with most of the other commas, especially in the
first stanza, and the effect he achieves is well to
his purpose, since it suggests the tirelessness of
the spider’s work and the corresponding tireless-
ness of the soul’s constant exploration. There is
no time to pause.
The theme of all versions of the poem,
including the unpublished notebook version, is
of the isolated individual reaching out for mean-
ingful connection with something outside him-
self. Perhaps at its simplest, the poem is an
expression of the poet’s loneliness, as if the pain
of being locked into a separate self is too much,
and he must spontaneously reach out to over-
come that separation through a vital connection
with another person. The poem may well also
be about approaching death, and about the
poet’s desire to be assured of the soul’s contin-
ued existence, a plea for consciousness not to be
extinguished when the physical body dies. In
fact, when Whitman published the poem in the
Broadway, it appeared not as a separate poem
but as the third section in a single poem titled
‘‘Whispers of Heavenly Death.’’ This strengthens
the notion that the poem is indeed about death
and the survival of the soul. Death was a fre-
quent and favorite topic for Whitman; in an
article collected in hisSelected Essays, the Eng-
lish poet D. H. Lawrence, a fellow romantic who
certainly understood Whitman, put it well when
he wrote,
Whitman is a very great poet, of the end of life.
A very great post mortem poet, of the transi-
tions of the soul as it loses its integrity. The poet
of the soul’s last shout and shriek, on the con-
fines of death.Lawrence may well be right, but there is more to
this particular poem than the shriek of a soul at
the approach of death. Whitman was a man who
longed for connection with absolutely every-
thing he could conceive of—big and small, ani-
mate and apparently inanimate; he sensed the
vastness of the human self—he often used the
termsself,soul,andspiritto mean much the
same thing—and its capacity to feel a kinship
with every atom in the entire cosmos. He said
this explicitly, again and again, in his poetry, as
even a cursory reading of ‘‘Song of Myself’’ will
demonstrate. He also expressed similar ideas in
prose, as in the following passage from a note-
book entry, included in a volume of Whitman’s
unpublished prose edited by Edward F. Grier:
The soul or spirit transmutes itself into all
matter—into rocks, and can [illegible] live the
life of a rock—into the sea, and can feel itself
the sea—into the oak, or other tree—into an
animal, and feel itself a horse, a fish, or a bird—
into the earth—into the motions of the suns
and stars—
A man only is interested in any thing when he
identifies himself with it....
The evidence supplied by so much of Whit-
man’s poetry suggests that the identification
between self and other that he describes is
accomplished not through some huge imagina-
tive effort but simply by a recognition, as a fact
of experience, that the essence of the individual
self is the same as the consciousness that runs
through everything that exists. Whitman’s own
awakening to this knowledge was what gave rise
toLeaves of Grassin the first place and was no
doubt stimulated by his reading of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, that sturdy transcendentalist, whose
work Whitman greatly admired. In Emerson’s
essay ‘‘The Over-Soul,’’ published in 1841, Emer-
son wrote of
that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every
man’s particular being is contained and made
one with all other.... Within man is the soul of
the whole; the wise silence; the universal
beauty, to which every part and particle is
equally related; the eternalONE.
Whitman likely read these words before he
wrote Leaves of Grass, and they stayed with
him, although he found his own distinctive way
of expressing the central truth he recognized in
Emerson’s essay. But he also acknowledged that
the individual does not always feel this sense of
unity with all things; he does not always con-
sciously live within the Over-Soul. The expanded
self is quite capable of collapsing into smallness
and separation; it can cut itself off from the whole
and make itself wretched. If ‘‘Song of Myself,’’
the poem with which Whitman announced
his poetic presence to the world, is a celebration
of the transcendental self—Emerson’s Over-Soul,
which knows no restrictions of time or space and
flows into and out of everything that lives—thenA Noiseless Patient Spider