18 pages • 36 minutes read
A Noiseless Patient Spider
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Background
Literary Context: Emblem Poetry
“A Noiseless Patient Spider” is an example of emblem poetry, a genre of centuries-old didactic poetry that uses everyday objects as occasions for lessons in abstract and often difficult concepts. A stunning sunrise, for instance, represents new beginnings and the gift of God’s hope; bold red roses with prickly thorns represent the caution against giving in too easily to the pull of passion; an overfed hog symbolizes the sin of gluttony; a skull represents the stark inevitability of mortality. Emblem poetry focused on presenting that single image and presented it without poetic or rhetorical touches. Here, Whitman begins with a snapshot illustration of the spider diligently shooting out filament and, in turn, creating a magnificent webbing. He then explains his emblem in the second stanza: The spider represents (not symbolizes) the efforts of the yearning soul to make connections with the cosmos that defy the limits of space and time.
Emblem poetry dates to the early Renaissance, when clerics and theologians struggled to teach a barely literate public that learned much quicker from illustrations. For contemporary readers, emblem poetry can seem capricious and dictatorial—the writer actually telling the reader how to think. Unlike symbols in more contemporary literature, that is, suggestive and multilayered objects that become occasions for rich debate and invite readerly interpretation, emblems are unidimensional. Often, the poet provides commentary that explains exactly what the poet intends the reader to understand. In this tradition, the poet emerges as a gentle and patient teacher helping the reader grasp what is otherwise an abstract and complicated idea.
Cultural Context
Gilded Age America cultivated a rich archive of literature and art that focused on the reality of death. Whitman’s generation survived a war in which more than 600,000 Americans died. An emerging media machine covered the rising urban culture with unblinking documentarian realism in which the awareness of death escalated at alarming rates. Given the packed populations of urban centers and the consequent rise in horrific accidents, crime, poor hygiene, disease, inadequate housing developments, risky industrial environments, two presidential assassinations within 15 years of each other, two international wars, and a near constant 30-year border war in the West against Indigenous populations, death was a sobering part of Gilded Age America. Add to that the cultural drift from the stability and confidence in the Christian afterlife and a rising generation of philosophers who argued for existentialism, and Whitman’s poem takes on significant cultural depth.
Indeed, Whitman himself revisited “A Noiseless Patient Spider” when he began to realize his own extraordinary 10-year valiant struggle against numerous debilitating illnesses was a losing battle. Learning difficult lessons about mortality as a volunteer nurse in field hospitals in and around Washington, DC, during the bloodiest months of the Civil War, Whitman recorded his impressions of people: bandages soaked red, dying from bacterial infections, or screaming from amputation procedures done without anesthesia, struggling to adjust to the loss of eyesight or to missing limbs. Those recollections haunt his post-Civil War musings. This poem offers a radiant confidence that the body, for all its obvious failings, is merely the imperfect casing for a most magnificent energy. Without relying on the idea of an afterlife, Whitman here reminds a culture too aware of mortality that death is never the last word.
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By Walt Whitman
