Analysis Of A Noiseless Patient Spider

In “A Noiseless Patient Spider”, the speaker watches a spider, which is on a small rock jutting from the ground. The spider begins to spin its web so it can explore the world around it and build its home. It does this repeatedly and effortlessly until the finish. The speaker, then, makes comparisons between the spider and his soul—how, like the spider, his soul is “surrounded” and “detached”. In this poem, the themes—the quest for enlightenment, the courage to travel alone, and perseverance—and symbols, such as the title itself, reveal so much about the comparisons between the spider and the speaker’s soul. The spider’s quest for enlightenment in the immensity of the universe is present in this poem; it allows the reader to have a more positive outlook of the poem. The spider “launched forth filament, filament, filament out of itself” so it can make way from place to place to explore what is around it. …show more content…
It could mean anything... Maybe, it is just what to speaker thinks of the spider, or it could mean more that than. In line one the speaker says that the spider is noiseless and patient. Calling the spider this could possibly refer to how incompetent small creatures, such as spiders, are within the ecosystem; no on hears them with a naked ear, let along care enough to understand how they live life because it is so irrelevant. The speaker decides that he is going to watch the spider and attempt to obtain a clear understanding of its life as he points out the spider upon a small rock. The spider has all this unoccupied space around, but what it does makes very little difference to its surroundings. The speaker mentions how his soul is lonely in a “measureless ocean of space” in comparison to the spider in “the vacant vast surrounding.” In lines seven through ten, he also entails that he is basically soul searching and eventually finds what his had been looking