Poem Of The Day

Another of Whitman's small and great poem. This one is called "A Noiseless Patient Spider". The poem imagines a small spider noiselessly and forever toiling in an uncertain surrounding, trying to find its footing. The spider isolated on a rocky beach, clutching to anything it can hold on to, sending out yarns and pulling them back in to explore the vast emptiness around it, to figure out anything it can root on to, anything that made sense or to make sense of it.

An precisely in the same manner, the speaker's effort to connect to the universe. Standing there, along in this world, his soul laid bare, surrounded and detached in this vastness of space and thought and time. Never tiring to find a connection, a meaning in this world that gives some sense to it, some perspective to living and life in this endless search and madness till the time the gossamer thread do clutch to something tangible and real. Whether the speaker is able to find something in the universe or he spends his whole life searching for it is not clear.

You can read another of Whitman's gems here.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

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 filament, filament, filament 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 fling catch somewhere, O my soul.