A Noiseless Patient Spider, by Walt Whitman
This poem is from Walt Whitman‘s 1855 collection Leaves of Grass. If you’ve never read Leaves of Grass, you should give it a try. It’s like the very first beat poetry, written 100 years before all the rest.
A Noiseless Patient Spider
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.
Here is the poem read by Gord MacKenzie for Librivox
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