“A Noiseless Patient Spider” is an example of emblem poetry, a genre of centuries-old didactic poetry that uses everyday objects as occasions for lessons in abstract and often difficult concepts. A stunning sunrise, for instance, represents new beginnings and the gift of God’s hope; bold red roses with prickly thorns represent the caution against giving in too easily to the pull of passion; an overfed hog symbolizes the sin of gluttony; a skull represents the stark inevitability of mortality. Emblem poetry focused on presenting that single image and presented it without poetic or rhetorical touches. Here, Whitman begins with a snapshot illustration of the spider diligently shooting out filament and, in turn, creating a magnificent webbing. He then explains his emblem in the second stanza: The spider represents (not symbolizes) the efforts of the yearning soul to make connections with the cosmos that defy the limits of space and time.

Emblem poetry dates to the early Renaissance, when clerics and theologians struggled to teach a barely literate public that learned much quicker from illustrations. For contemporary readers, emblem poetry can seem capricious and dictatorial—the writer actually telling the reader how to think.