Today’s Poem: A Noiseless Patient Spider

Jonathan Edwards, Walt Whitman, and the last days of natural philosophy

Spider attempting to balloon (Wikimedia Commons)

In 1723, the twenty-year-old Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) — whom we may recall chiefly as the author of the 1741 “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the most enduringly famous sermon of the First Great Awakening in America — sent to Paul Dudley, a Massachusetts resident but also a member Royal Society of London, an epistolary essay entitled “The Spider Letter.” Edwards’s acute observation of the habits of New England’s “flying” or ballooning spiders illuminates not only his dual interests in theology and what was then still known as “natural philosophy,” but also his placement on an intellectual timeline that begins with Aristotle, encompasses Isaac Newton, and ends — or begins to distill into what we think of simply as science — during Charles Darwin’s lifetime (1809–1882).