Preview

Walt Whitman's A Noiseless Patient Spider

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
387 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
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,
Continue Reading
View Writing Issues

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Caught In The Widow's Web By Gordon Grice Summary
    • 895 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Caught In The Widow's Web By Gordon Grice Summary

    When describing his perception of the widow as a child he says it was, “worthy of ritual disposition, like an enemy whose death is not sufficient.” By using this simile, he helps his audience gain a better sense of what he was taught to believe as a young boy which is that the spider has no regard for life and kills or hurts without a motive. Alliteration can also be found at the end of this essay when Grice writes, “world with the widow.” He wants the reader to focus on that section of the text because it contains the important meaning that God created the widow for a reason, although one may not perceive it that way. Grice strategically uses parallelism in this essay as well. When describing the fears people direct towards the widow, he says, “It is black; it avoids the light; it is a voracious carnivore.” The use of the phrase “it is” is repeated in these lines to organize the idea and make it easier to understand. He utilizes these literary devices so he can portray the overall meaning to the readers in a way they can connect to and understand…

    • 895 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Whitman's Essay 'When I Heard The Learn' D Astronomer
    • 501 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Whitman's Essay 'When I Heard The Learn' D Astronomer

    In the poem “When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer”, by Walt Whitman, the speaker “[becomes] tired and sick” of the learned astronomer's “proofs, [and] figures” used to observe the stars. While the others attending the lecture applaud the astronomer for his approach to the stars, the speaker, however, exits the lecture hall to enjoy the stars in his preferred method of going outside in the “perfect silence”. These contrasting scenes expose the dichotomous relationship of the speaker’s and the astronomer's approach to observing the stars. The use of structure, diction, and imagery reveal how the astronomer’s approach of observing the stars is far too mechanical and structured to truly see their beauty.…

    • 501 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Woolf vs. Petrunkevitch
    • 534 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Woolf vs. Petrunkevitch

    Woolf’s tone seen throughout her piece is pity and futility. This is seen and solidified in paragraph 2 when the speaker pities the moth for being a moth on a day where so much joy and wonder is possible for other living things. She sees the moth’s actions as futile as it zigzags back and forth between the two sills. She begins to relate with the moth in this way that life seems futile. Petrunkevitch uses a tone that is personal while at the same time staying professional. This tone is similar to that of Woolf in the way that although Woolf’s written perspective doesn’t suggest that she is connecting to the moth she does actually solidly say that she is interested in its actions and is “roused” by its attitude. Petrunkevitch clearly shows interest in the subjects that he talks about. He is “roused” by the spider’s actions as the digger wasp slowly closes off all of its hopes of escape.…

    • 534 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Philosophical Argument In The Poem Design
    • 702 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Philosophical Argument In The Poem Design

    The question the poem emphasizes is one in which why evil has to be a dark horse in this world as well as in what way simple things came to be. According to Leibniz, if all God was concerned about was to create no evil and suffering, the easiest mechanism would have been to design no world at all. In order to produce good, you need evil. In Natural Theology, “The Design Argument” was challenged by Darwinism, which disputed the evidence that we were created for the environment, but stated that we adapted to the environment. It was deemed, “survival of the fittest,” which can be applied to the poem. In nature, the fittest will survive—in Frost’s case, the spider survived over the moth. The white spider and the moth are a symbol for the faultlessness of God’s creation and the evil that has entered it by natural…

    • 702 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Ee Cummings Dbq
    • 395 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Ee Cummings Dbq

    In the poem “L(a” it describes a lonesome leaf falling to the terrain(Doc A). The words he used to portray this form an L which might mean loneliness or it may look like the flight the leaf took to the ground. In another poem called “rpophessagr” which is a poem about a grasshopper(Doc B).As a result the letters and words ,which are misplaced, forms of what seems to be the journey the grasshopper has taken.…

    • 395 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Comparison between November Story and November night, Edinburgh
    • 766 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Comparison between November Story and November night, Edinburgh

    Throughout the poem, animal imagery is used to show the atmosphere and the mood. For example “Where shadows prowled the alleys.” The word prowled makes us think of a predatory animal and shows the atmosphere to be quite sinister and dark.…

    • 766 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Edward Taylor and the Metaphor
    • 521 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Edward Taylor and the Metaphor

    In Taylor’s “Upon A Spider Catching A Fly”, he uses personification to illustrate the dance of death between Satan, the spider, and human beings, the wasp and the fly. Within the beginning of the poem, Taylor gives us the account of who the wasp is and what happened to him when he fell into the web of temptation. The spider explains, “I saw a pettish wasp fall foul therein, whom yet thy whorl pins did not clasp lest he should fling his sting.” Here Taylor is…

    • 521 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Walt Whitman's When I Heard The Learned Astronomer
    • 900 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Walt Whitman's When I Heard The Learned Astronomer

    Upon a "certain hour", or sleep, the speaker beckons his soul to fly free, escape the day, and ponder its own themes. The speaker's soul does not necessarily appreciate the day's happenings and thoughts, so it drifts in dreaming to a place where it can think about "night, sleep, death, and the stars." The daytime mind of the speaker, most likely representing a restricted or bound form, thinks about things it is perhaps not naturally inclined to do. This poem is like a snap-shot of the human soul between consciousness and…

    • 900 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Upon a Spider Catching a Flyyyy
    • 488 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Upon a Spider Catching a Flyyyy

    A spider works hard to spin its web. It takes lots of time and uses materials that are made by the spider itself just to catch a fly. What benefits does the spider get from catching the fly? Why does it only catch flies? Why not other bugs? In the second stanza, Taylor asks why the spider doesn’t catch wasps? Perhaps, it is because of his the sting the wasp can provide. If the wasp were to get caught, the spider could be harmed in the process.…

    • 488 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Walt Whitman and His Strange Obsession With God
    • 1967 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Walt Whitman and His Strange Obsession With God

    Walt Whitman was an egotistical, self-absorbed, wild heretic. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” (Songs of Myself 1). Multiple times in his books and essays he claims to be better than the masses. “I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best” (Preface to a Leaves of Grass). Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune (Songs of the Open Road). Walt Whitman is often thought of as an atheist, but I’m not buying it. In my opinion Whitman deep down believed that there was a God, and not only did he believe that there was a God, he believed himself to be better than God. That’s why it’s nearly impossible to read a Whitman book or poem without seeing some sort of reference to God. I don’t believe in the tooth fairy and that’s about the only quote you’ll get from me regarding the tooth fairy. If I ever end up writing any form of literature I will rarely make, if any, references to the tooth fairy. Whitman claims to not believe in God but you’ll find thousands of quotes of him regarding God. It’s like when one of your friends says that they don’t like a person, yet they never stop talking about that person, it’s safe to say that subconsciously they like that person. Since Whitman won’t stop ranting about God I’m going to say and aim to prove that he subconsciously believed in God, tried to get others to not believe in God, thought of himself as God and that he was better than God.…

    • 1967 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Caught in the Widow's Web
    • 560 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Caught in the Widow's Web

    In “Caught in the Widow’s Web” Grice discusses the web of the spider by using adjectives such as: “ugliest, stiff, and smells”. He portrays the image of spiders’ webs being a foul object. Grice intricately uses adjectives to show the spider’s aggressiveness towards his victims. The Widows have an immense appetite, eating anything that lands in their sticky web. The Black Widow spiders have been seen “eating scarab beetles heavy as pecans” they have also been seen eating “arthropods of various sizes”. When an insect becomes entangled in the web the Black Widow injects a toxin that harms the organs, slows down the intestines of the prey, and continues to inject the same toxin three times to destroy the prey. The essay attributes the venom to fear, and venom creates an image of death in our minds.…

    • 560 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Ap English Literature Extended Response
    • 1148 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Ap English Literature Extended Response

    This piece is formulated through an allegory which exists on both a literal and figurative level. Virginia Woolf relates the struggles that a moth, which is so vulnerable to death to the everyday life of the human struggle. Implicitly, Woolf describes the moth to have value like individuals as they try to put a stop to death in the same sense like humans do.…

    • 1148 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Holy the Firm
    • 720 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Holy the Firm

    4. The thing that makes the spider web miraculous is that it is in an inconvenient place and it’s a mess of a web but the spider still works with it and manages to survive, even thrive, using it. Dillard has shown in this essay that she is very fond of nature and the natural world and that she finds everything about nature fascinating and beautiful and she romanticizes things that usually have a bad reputation such as spiders.…

    • 720 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Analysis Of The Poem Beat ! By Walter Whitman
    • 284 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Analysis Of The Poem Beat ! By Walter Whitman

    The poem Beat! Beat! Drums! by Walter Whitman best represents the Civil War. This is because of how the author expresses the loud booming of the instruments. The music is meant to drown out any sound from the people, and distract them from their daily activities. People are not responding to this war cry, making the bugles and drums get louder and louder to drown out everyone from the mothers to the carpenters. Whitman’s tone is excitement, proved by the use of his exclamation points at the beginning of each stanza, “ Beat! beat! drums!-blow! bugles! blow!”…

    • 284 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Upon a Spider Catching a Fly by Edward Taylor: Beliefs of the Puritans in the 17th Century
    • 322 Words
    • 1 Page

    Upon a Spider Catching a Fly by Edward Taylor: Beliefs of the Puritans in the 17th Century

    In this poem, Edward Taylor is questioning the Puritan beliefs and the question of nature. The spider symbolizes the Puritans and all of their beliefs. The believers in the Puritan doctrine are mirrored in the supernatural world by the flies. The flies are the people chosen by God, or the elect. The wasps represent a human that is not chosen by God, or the non-elects. The wasps defense against the fly mirrors a person in the natural word who questions the Puritan beliefs.…

    • 322 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
    Read More

Related Topics