Analysis Of Walt Whitman s Poem A Noiseless Patient...

Few poets can craft a piece of work that is as simplistic as it is complex. Walt Whitman does just this in his poem â€Å"A Noiseless Patient Spider†. Although only two stanzas for a total of ten lines, the amount of thought and intention put into this work is innumerable. A close read could provide countless hours of discussion for even the most highly intelligent of minds. This simple beauty is what makes a poem like â€Å"A Noiseless Patient Spider† great. In the piece, an observer watches a spider begin to weave a web, and then the observer begins to question his own existence, inspired by the spider. This poem is bursting with evidence to support this theme of a questioned existence. Walt Whitman uses succinct diction and an extended metaphor emphasized by the poem’s structure to show the similarities between the spiders life and the speaker’s own inquiring of his existence. Only with intricate usage of these things can such an acute analogy be made. That is what makes this seemingly insignificant joining of lines so significant. The poem is separated into two stanzas separate in plot but the theme and format is almost identical. In such a short poem, word choice is crucial to fully explicating the intended meaning of the poem. The primary element the reader sees when they look at this poem is the title. â€Å"A Noiseless Patient Spider† does much to emphasize the impending metaphor before the poem even begins. Already, one can see that the poem is about a spider. The spider however