A Noiseless, Patient Spider

This morning I had an unintended scary moment. Evangelical spirituality was once defined as early rising, prayer and Bible reading. Most mornings I am guilty of all three. And this morning, having risen early, I glimpsed rapid movement across the carpet. A ginormous spider, disturbed in its nocturnal perambulations, was using its over an inch long legs (eight of them) to motor towards whatever hole was home. It didn’t make it. My pencil jar became its temporary prison, till the rest of the house was up and I released it into the less comfy temperatures of our front drive – where it can take its chances, which are likely to be better than if someone else in our house had spotted his incursion.

Walt Whitman’s poem, ‘A Noiseless Patient Spider’ is a thoughtful and positive piece of PR for misunderstood and persecuted spiders.

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

I like the wistfulness, and playful seriousness of Whitman’s poetry.