The pen will ALWAYS be mightier than the sword.

This is perhaps the thousandth time I’ve read “A Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman. And every single time, without skipping a beat, it takes my breath away.

The poem, to me, is a departure from Whitman’s other poems. For the most part he writes very explicitly about nature and sexual freedom and romantic notions of beauty in his poems. Although this appeals to me, and although his poetry is obviously unexplainably beautiful, “A Noiseless Patient Spider” goes beyond anything he has written.

“A noiseless patient spider”

The opening line in itself is enough to floor me. It connotes such a powerful image of a spider, sitting quietly, waiting…waiting for something. It’s a bit disturbing, but it lures you in and makes you want to read on. What is the spider waiting for? Why must it be so patient?

“And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,”

Whitman uses the analogy of a spider to describe his soul, his wandering detached soul. The spider spins and sends out its filament in an endless search for an anchor. The spider is lost in the world. It is freely afloat in an expansive, unending ocean with nothing to guide it or to tie it down. Normally such freedom would be interpreted as a good thing, something to aspire to.

However, this is Whitman’s soul. This spider represents everyone’s souls. All souls need grounding of some sort. It is unclear at the end whether Whitman finds this or not. You can read it optimistically in thinking that the spider’s filament eventually grabs onto the anchor it so desperately seeks. On the other hand, you can also read it pessimistically in that the filament never reaches anything; it just keeps unreeling endlessly into the vast ocean of space.

Sometimes I feel my own soul drifting out into an ocean, and sometimes it’s very difficult for me to reel it in again. Nothing provokes this feeling, and nothing takes it away, exactly. It comes and goes, like the ebb and flow of a tide. Feeling adrift in your own body is indescribable, yet Whitman seems to put it into words perfectly. This is why I love poetry. A poet has the power to capture a feeling you’ve felt so many times, but could never articulate to others; the poet puts this feeling into concrete words and forms. The poet makes you aware of others’ feeling this exact same way. The poet can make the world seem a little smaller, a little more comforting.