Poetry is both personal and universal, focusing on small themes and vast themes. Whitman's spider/soul poem is a useful example of this definition of poetry.
Please visit Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient Spider" to read the poem.
Commentary
Whitman’s brief ten-line poem exemplifies an idea he had jotted down in his notebook: "small in theme yet has it the sweep of the universe." —from Walt Whitman's Notebook page 19 LOC #94
In the first verse paragraph, the speaker of the poem creates a little drama as he recounts his experience of watching a spider trying to find a place to spin its web. We see the spider positioned alone on some object which the speaker chooses not to identify but merely calls a “little promontory.”
He tells us that the spider was exploring the vast space around him by throwing out the thread-like material that spiders use to spin webs: “It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.” He sees the spider do this many times throwing, throwing each thread out of itself, and it continues this activity for a long while.
In the second verse paragraph, the speaker directly addresses his own soul and compares it to the spider. Like the spider his soul is “surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space” and like the spider sending out his “filaments,” the speaker’s soul searches for a place to connect itself.
The spider is simply trying to find places to anchor its filaments so it can spin a web, but the speaker’s soul is searching for a lasting connection whether a friendship with another human being or more profoundly a connection with its Creator. Thus the poem can be considered “small in theme” in the first verse paragraph, yet contain a “sweep of the universe” in the second verse paragraph.
