Walt Whitman's A Noiseless Patient Spider
In Walt Whitman’s 1860’s lyric poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider”, this poem was written during the 1860’s and published in the 1871 – 1872 editions of “Leave of Grass”. Whitman depicts an equivalent relationship between a spider and an individual. I believe the spider symbolizes the speaker’s mind/soul, and he speaks to as though he is talking to someone else. The speaker uses the poem to illustrate a comparative relationship between what seems to be a quest for spiritual knowledge or enlightenment and the construction of a spider’s web. The spider represents the speaker’s mind/soul or consciousness, and the actions that the spider takes, such as selecting a place to build a web, as well as physically linking the strands of the web together,