reaching, throwing out for love,” like a spider leaping to connect its ¤la-
ment to a distant support, seeks to make an intimate “connection” with
a passing stranger. Apparently not having succeeded, the persona defers
the accomplishment of such a “connection” to a postmortem future in
which he anticipates being wafted to “waiting oceans of love! yearning
and fervid! and of you sweet souls perhaps for the future, delicious and
long: / But Dead, unknown on this earth—ungiven, dark here, unspoken,
never born: / You fathomless latent souls of love—you pent and unknown
oceans of love!”^9 While retaining the draft poem’s essential metaphor of
outreach, Whitman fashioned the superb lyric in which the spider’s leap
from its “little promontory” to af¤x its “gossamer thread... somewhere”
now represents the solitary persona’s envisioned leap of faith from the
known life to a spiritual anchorage in an uncharted existence:
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 ¤lament, ¤lament, ¤lament, 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 ®ing catch somewhere, O my soul.The published poem is a striking statement of Whitman’s faith in im-
mortality. Scientists had found no evidence that the individual life could
continue after the body expires, and the negative impact of science upon
religious belief was shocking to many nineteenth-century intellectu-
als. Friedrich Engels notes that many world-famous scientists in the
1870s, fearful of pursuing materialist science to the conclusion that physi-
cal death is ¤nal, turned for af¤rmation to spirit-rappings, “magneto-
phrenological miracles,” and other irrational solutions.^10 But a Unitarian
minister demonstrated that “A Noiseless Patient Spider” could be inter-
preted in terms of the pro-immortality argument then being widely pro-
moted by the liberal clergy. He saw the poem as a testament of Whit-
210 / “ Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”