A noiseless, Patient Spider Essay

Submitted By hbkdev
Words: 456
Pages: 2

Author, Walt Whiteman In his poem, “A Noiseless Patient Spider” uses the simple imagery of a spider to portray a deeper human emotion. The speaker sets up the metaphor, which is a quiet spider, alone on a point of land jutting out into a body of water. Whitman repeats the title of the poem, “A noiseless patient spider”, as the first line, telling us that the spider’s quiet patience is important to the poem. Then the speaker goes on to say “It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, / Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.” Even though, at this point, the reader only knows that the spider is on an isolated piece of land with a “vacant, vast surrounding,” we feel the theme of the poem to be the spider’s ceaseless effort to make a connection to something or someone. Whitman uses the technique called alliteration in the line “vacant vast surrounding,” in order to put a larger emphasis the feeling of loneliness. The speaker uses apostrophe to begin and end the second stanza when he says, “And you O my soul where you stand, … Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the/ spheres to connected them,/ Till the bridge you will need be form’d…Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my/ soul”. The use of apostrophe helps to clarify what we are meant to feel from his personification of the spider, which is the desperation, expressed when the speaker cries out to his soul. The mood of this poem is helpless, lonely, and desperate, but at the same time, strangely hopeful because of the spider’s determination to find a connection. With the repetition of the word “filament”, the speaker illustrates the constant effort of the spider. By using the