A Noiseless Patient Spider Analysis

Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our...

Free VerseAs is almost always the case with Whitman, this poem is written in free verse. That means that it doesn’t rhyme, and there’s no set rhythm or meter. This form of poetry was pr...

All right, Whitman is a genius and all, but, let’s take a step back. Imagine that some guy comes up to you on a bus, and tells you that he was looking at this spider and watching it try to sp...

We don’t get a lot of help with the actual setting of this poem. In fact, the only place we hear much about is "a little promontory." Thanks a bunch, Walt – that makes everything clear....

Repetition is a huge part of this poem’s style. Words, phrases, and sounds all come rolling in again and again. To us, it sounds a little like waves rolling in on a beach. They are repetitive...

Well, it matters a lot that it’s exactly the same as the poem’s first line. A title always gives a poet an important chance to draw our attention to a particular part of the poem. Here,...

Free, Wild, and PersonalWhitman’s poems almost always burst with excitement and curiosity about the world. That’s not to say that they are happy, but you can usually recognize his infec...

(4) Base Camp There are a few tricky words here, but once you’ve figured out the main image in the poem, it should be smooth sailing. Whitman likes to make his poems clear and accessible. Som...

Canadians have inserted spider genes into goats so that they will make special web proteins in their milk. If Whitman had stuck around a hundred years or so, he could have written "A Noiseless Pati...

GWe’re pretty low on sex here. If you find spiders sexy, that’s fine with us, but we don’t think that’ll change the rating much.