Noiseless Patient Spider

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In his poem A Noiseless Patient Spider, Walt Whitman talks about how a spider is lost in a large space and is working hard to find a connection to everything around it. He compares it to his own life and how he hopes he will be able to use bridges or ships to find connections in large “oceans of space (7)” to prevent feeling isolated. Whitman expresses this through an extended metaphor, repetition of certain words or phrases, and alliteration. Whitman uses the extended metaphor to compare how hard a spider works to connect things on a smaller scale to how hard he will have to work to connect things on a larger scale. The first stanza talks about a spider that is always surrounded by empty space and how it works hard to create a spider …show more content…

The first instance of repetition is where Whitman writes “filament, filament, filament (4).” This use of repetition shows how the spider is constantly working hard to shoot out the fibers to make the connections. Because that word is relatively long and it takes up most of the line, it also makes it seem as if the spider doesn’t get a chance to do anything else because it is busy working on making the web. Whitman also repeats the word “Till” three times in the last stanza where he says “Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,/Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere (9-10)” The repetition of this word is also important because it makes it seem as if his main goal is to find the connections even though he is surrounded by nothing. He will not be able to rest until he has finished creating large connections using bridges and ships. He then returns back to the spider in his last “till” phrase by talking about how the spider will also not be able to stop working until the fibers that the spider shoots out actually have something to hold on to and are finally

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