A Noiseless Patient Spider

Christianity posits that the physical world is a manifestation of the Creator’s power and glory. Whitman, using the urgent (and heretical) theology he read in Emerson’s essays and poetry, seeks to upcycle this Christian notion of oneness with a secular faith in the oneness of the organic world itself. There is nothing in the material universe that does not participate in that grand harmony. The concept of isolation is therefore moot, and the fear of mortality is ironic. Every element of the natural world is part of this energy field. The loss of any individual part, from a grasshopper to a seagull, from a human being to a star, is inconceivably irrelevant. The energy field is sustained despite—not because of—any individual.

For the individual, however, essential oneness without God demands an even greater leap of faith than Judeo-Christianity demanded. The poem here relaxes the grandness of Whitman’s theology by using the image of a spider spinning its web. Whitman draws on the parable teachings of Christ himself, who often used readily available and very domestic images to teach his philosophy: a vine, a lamb, seeds at planting time. However, such a perception is an illusion caused by the anxiety of vulnerability, in a universe in which the comforting notion of a Creator-God had, in just a few decades of scientific breakthroughs and bold philosophical treatises, become suddenly irrelevant for many.