A Noiseless Patient Spider

by Walt Whitman

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Does "A Noiseless Patient Spider" show irony, repetition or rhyme?

Expert Answers

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If you look at the poem, you will be able to see this quite clearly for yourself.

First, you look to see if the poem has any rhymes in it.  Nope, no rhymes.  It's ending lines with spider, isolated, surrounding, itself, them.  There are no rhymes there.

Okay, so now look to see if there's irony.  None that I can see.  He does not seem to be saying the opposite of his actual words.

So what about repetition?  There's plenty of it.  You've got "mark'd" in lines 2 and 3.  You've got the word "filament" repeated three times.   In line 5 you have "ever" repeated.

The same kind of thing happens in the second stanza.  So this poem has repetition.

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