Poem #1: A Noiseless Patient Spider by Walt Whitman

November 2, 2025

I am trying to start a new hobby of memorizing poetry.

While it seems pointless now that anyone can pull up any poem on their smartphone, I find satisfaction in the idea of being able to access these words at any time—on a crowded train after work, waiting for coffee to brew, in the shower, or walking to the station. I’ve also heard of extreme circumstances, for example, of prisoners of war or hostages who bided their time with memorized verses.

For my first poem, I asked an AI tool to find me a short poem from Walt Whitman, one of the first names that came to mind.

Poem

A Noiseless Patient Spider

By Walt Whitman

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.

Source

Thoughts

I like the subtlety of “you will need” instead of “you need”; we are striving for something whose nature we don’t know, but will someday find and depend on.

This poem had some new words for me, too: promontory, a point of high land. I first heard this word in Promontory Summit, but didn’t know the definition.

Also ductile: stretchable, capable of being drawn out into thread without breaking.

After memorizing the poem, I found I was mistakenly adding a comma after the first occurrence of “O my soul”. I decided it may be too hard to memorize exact punctuation and to be content with just the words; even mixing up some words may be OK. In fact, as I learned while drafting this post, the punctuation has evolved over publications of the poem in Whitman’s lifetime, and there actually was a comma in that spot when the poem was first published in 1868 as part of a larger poem. So it just goes to show poems are not necessarily a frozen and immutable sequence of tokens.