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). Yet that uncertainty does not impact the raw, urgent energy of shooting out the webbing. Likewise for Whitman, the soul sends out its own sort of webbing. In the cogitations and reflections, questionings and meditations on the stubborn mysteries of time and space, the soul, Whitman’s spider, projects those investigations outward, “ceaselessly” (Line 8) exploring into sublime mystery what appears otherwise to be the dreary material world locked into the iron logic of time.

In that very act of bold “musing” (Line 8), the soul connects to a cosmos, a vibrant, limitless energy field that in turn catapults the individual soul out of the narrow corridors of time and away from cloistered perceptions of space into eternity. Unlike the religious conceptions of eternity that often feature salvation or damnation, this cosmic eternity offers transcendence into energy. In this argument, Whitman draws on the critical protocols of the new sciences. The sciences were perceived at the time as antagonists to organized religion, as they systematically took apart assumptions that were millennia-old about the makeup of the material world and the function of the soul itself. Whitman valorizes investigation; his questioning elevates the soul into an eternity earned not as a result of good works or unquestioning faith. Rather, the soul earns its way into eternity by questioning, investigating, accepting no version of the material world as anything but a premise to be tested. It is the brash argument of a young man (Whitman originally drafted the poem in his forties) now being voiced by a much older man turning squarely to face a death he felt in his very bones was fast approaching.

The poem ultimately argues that the soul can feel lonely, vulnerable, ironic, useless, and even nonexistent. These feelings are the result of living an unexamined life. The inquisitive mind, however, driven by the hungry heart and sustained by free will, will connect to the cosmos through the energy of “musing, venturing, throwing, and seeking the spheres to connect them” (Line 8). The mind, the heart, and the soul will “catch somewhere” (Line 10). Like a spider shooting out filament on the slimmest assurance of making connections and then, in turn, creating the stunning geometry of a spider web, the soul questions every moment, interrogates every action on the slimmest assurance that such inquiries, what the speaker calls “the gossamer thread” (Line 10), will reveal the magnificent spiritual dimensions of the material world.