A noiseless patient spider

Whitman first printed these lines in 1868 and later placed them in Leaves of Grass. He kept enlarging that book from 1855 to the last edition of 1891 and 1892. The contracted spellings mark’d and launch’d are his own, used to control the beat of the line. Project Gutenberg carries the complete Leaves of Grass.

Where this text comes fromA man watches a spider throw thread into empty space and does not, in these lines, say why it matters. The comparison the poem is famous for arrives later; what you type is the watching, held for as long as Whitman can hold it, with the spider given the same patient attention it is giving the gap it is trying to cross. Five lines, and the watcher shows himself in just two of them, the pair built on mark’d; the other three belong to the spider.

What you might not noticeThe word filament is repeated three times inside a single line, with nothing joining the repeats but commas. The closing line does the same thing with ever, twice over. Even mark’d comes twice, once near the start of a line and again opening the next. Source

What it trainsThe trap here is a word that comes back before you are done with it. Filament, filament, filament is three identical eight-letter words in one line, and by the third one the hand is already moving faster than the eye, so the comma between them is what goes missing. The three apostrophes in thirty-eight words are all the plain mark from your home row, and each sits inside a word where a modern spelling would put a vowel. Seven commas divide a single sentence of 249 characters that never reaches a full stop until the end. Five capitals, four inside the sentence. Words run long for a poem, more than five letters on average, and the three longest, promontory, surrounding, and tirelessly, land in three different lines. The rhythm is deliberately flat, which is where fingers start anticipating the next word instead of reading it.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg