A Noiseless Patient Spider

Given Whitman’s pioneering concept of open verse, “A Noiseless Patient Spider” creates not so much a beat of stressed/unstressed units as it sustains the tempo, like jazz. “A Noiseless Patient Spider” sounds accidental and conversational. Like jazz improvisations, Whitman sounds easy, feels easy. But Whitman, drawing on his love of opera (pure stimulation from the sounds of elegantly recited music, as Whitman only spoke English and did not know the words being sung) and his fascination with the cacophony of Manhattan’s streets, creates a careful patterning of sounds that, in turn, enhances rather than demands meter.

There are the more obvious manipulations of patterns to create a kind of chanting feel: assonance, for instance (the repetition of vowel sounds, usually long vowels, in the same line: “promontory”/“stood” [Line 2] or “unreeling”/“speeding” [Line 5]); alliteration (the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line: “vacant”/“vast” [Line 3], for instance, or “forth”/“filament” [Line 4]); and the manipulation of repetition (the word “filament,” for instance, and all the gerunds in Line 8). The poem works each line, subtly manipulating vowels and consonants, making each line its own unit of meter and allowing the recitation of each line to change with each delivery, like a jazz musician playing the same song every night but each time playing it differently.

It’s easy to hear Whitman’s shifting meter: Read the poem aloud and pretend you are sad, then read it aloud pretending you’re deliriously happy. That recreation of meter, as much psychological as it is mathematical, owes much to Whitman’s delight in opera, how arias changed each night despite being the same song and the same performer, a concept that made Whitman's own recitations and readings on the Lyceum circuit popular.