Soul of a noiseless patient spider
Dr Satypal Anand
I read Walt Whitman’s poem A Noiseless Patient Spider when I was just eighteen and had already written poetry, both in Urdu and English. I memorized it and let it evolve and revolve in my mind. The question I asked myself was, if the word “soul”in it is replaced by “poem”, will it not be more appropriate? Let’s now read the poem.
A noiseless patient spider
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated
Mark’d how to isolate the vacant cast surrounding
It launched 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 to be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch, somewhere, O my soul.
Today, when I am no longer 18 year of age, but touching the upper end of the eighties of my life, I feel that I wasn’t wrong when I had that puerile thought at the age of 18 that the word poem would beautifully replace the word soul in this stanza. If Whitman had been born in the 21st century, he would certainly have used the metaphor of the spider’s web for his creative urge to write a poem, rather than the amorphous nomenclature ‘soul’. As a great poet himself he would assuredly know that a poet also produces a filament of words that join in a perfect poetic pattern, not unlike the spider’s web.
Of a spider and Mankind was a poem I wrote about a decade back. I was with Saqi Farooqi in his old house on Surrey Garden Road in Hemdon, London. He had written one after an unwholesome encounter with a spider who was weaving a web on the side of his bath tub. Saqi showed me the corner in his house and told me that, standing still, he had watched the spider for a long time. He said that the spider, it seemed to him, was aware of his presence in the bathroom and yet didn’t stop regurgitating reel after reel of the gossamer thread that his entails produced. “So do you ! Don’t you?”I asked him and he nodded his head in affirmative. I do not have a copy of his poem for he just read it out to me but Saqi is a superb craftsman when it comes to poetry – no, not to poetry alone … to women also! His autobiography Pap Beeti is the documentary proof, not as much of his poetry but of his spiders’ webs for women.
The Urdu version of my poem I could find in my old computer and I am reproducing it right here: The English version, alas, I have lost. But does it matter to my readers? It probably doesn’t!
مکڑی جال کا جُلاہا
۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔
باغ میں لیمپ پوسٹ کے نیچے
ایک جھاڑی کے پتوں میں پیوست
ایک جالا ہے، سیمگوں، زر باف
کسی مکڑے کی زیرکی کی فسوں
اہلیت، اختراع، اُستادی
اور مہارت کا پر کشش چکمہ
رات کو لیمپ پوسٹ کے نیچے
اک ضیافت کا خوان سجتا ہے
رات بھر مکڑا کھاتا رہتا ہے
اور دن کاٹتا ہے سوتے ہوئے
مجھ کو مکڑے سے کوئی بَیر نہیں
پوچھنا ہے تو صرف اتنا ہی
جال کی بافت اور اس کی غرَض
نسل ِ آدم کو اس کے پرکھوں نے
کیسے سکھلائی ہو گی، جو اب تک
اپنے چاروں طرف مہارت سے
لوگ جالے ہی بُنتے رہتے ہیں
Coming back to Walt Whitman’s verse ….
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.
I do not ask you, my readers, to replace soul with the word poem where ever it comes, but if you yourself are a poet, do so …… and then let the poem sink into the entrails of your mind. It might come up with answers to questions like why and wherefore of you being a poet and not a normal person