Audiobook · read by volunteers
À Noiseless Patient Spider
Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
Read by Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Betsie Bush, Gord Mackenzie, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Osmia, Peter Yearsley, Mark Bradford, wedschild · 8 chapters · 11 min
About the book
A spider stands alone on a small promontory, sending out thread after thread from itself, again and again, into the empty space around it. The speaker of Walt Whitman’s short poem watches and recognises something. His own soul, too, is surrounded by vast spaces, endlessly throwing out filaments in the hope that they will catch somewhere. Whitman needs only a handful of lines to move from a tiny scene to a large question about loneliness and connection. Here, eight LibriVox volunteers read the poem in turn, as part of a weekly poetry project. The readings are brief, together lasting about twelve minutes, and each lets you hear the same images in a different voice and at a different pace. It is a quiet, reflective set, well suited to an evening pause, and an easy way to discover one of the most delicate poems in American literature.
Introduction
Walt Whitman (1819–1892) is often called the poet of American democracy. His collection Leaves of Grass, which he revised and expanded throughout his life, broke with the formal verse of his time and used long, flowing lines and an open, personal voice. A Noiseless Patient Spider is a short poem from that tradition, a small observation that opens onto a much larger meditation. The poem is brief, and its two stanzas are balanced like a scale: first the external scene, then the inner life that answers it. Listening to several readings makes this balance easy to hear.
The poem has two brief stanzas. In the first, the speaker notices a spider on a promontory, launching filament after filament out of itself. In the second, he turns to his own soul, which he imagines as similarly isolated and similarly reaching, seeking to connect the spheres around it. The comparison is simple, but it has been read as an image of curiosity, loneliness and creative effort. Written in free verse, it relies on the pull of its long, unrhymed lines rather than on rhyme. This recording is a multi-version collection. LibriVox volunteers produced eight different readings of the same poem for a weekly poetry project, so there are eight short chapters, one per reader, totalling around twelve minutes.
Hearing the poem repeatedly makes you attentive to details: where each reader breathes, which word they lean on and how the stillness of the opening gives way to longing. Each performance is a separate interpretation.
It is a short, rewarding listen for anyone who likes poetry, and a handy introduction to Whitman’s quieter side.
Public domain
Walt Whitman died in 1892: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text