What we now call, for convenience, "A Noiseless Patient Spider" could be thought of as an abstraction, a general term that includes an initial prose jotting, a fascinating notebook development of the topic, a periodical printing, and various book printings. Sometime between 1855 and 1863, Whitman recorded his earliest thoughts on what would ultimately become "A Noiseless Patient Spider":

     First I wish you to realize well that our boasted
     knowledge, precious and manifold as it is, sinks into
     niches and corners, before the infinite knowledge of the
     unknown. Of the real world of materials, what, after all,
     are these specks we call knowledge?--Of the spiritual
     world I announce to you this--much gibberish will always
     be offered and for a season obeyed--all lands, all times--
     the soul will yet feel--but to make a statement eludes us--
     By curious indirections only can there be any statement of
     the spiritual world--and they will all be foolish--Have
     you noticed the [worm] on a twig reaching out in the
     immense vacancy time and again, trying point after point?
     Not more hopelessly does the tongue or the pen of man,
     essay out in the spiritual spheres, to state them. In the
     nature of things nothing less than the special world
     itself can know itself--

Scholars have known for some time that Whitman took his initial tentative idea for an image (his uncertainty is noted by the brackets he supplied around the word worm) and developed it in a radically different Civil War context in one of his hospital notebooks. Edward Grier, the editor of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublised Prose Manuscripts was working at a time when the particular notebook containing this material was lost. So Grier attempted to reconstruct it from barely legible photostats made around 1940 or so. But Grier also had the habit of reordering leaves in the notebooks based an order he thought represented Whitman's compositional order or that reproduced what he thought was the continuity of Whitman's argument (by following arrows and other markers). Yet much of the time Grier is arbitrary about this procedure and there is little fidelity to the original documents.

The spider early draft as represented by Grier is contextualized in a fascinating though false way. Grier has Whitman launching into a draft of poetic lines about the spider with a distinct homoerotic tinge right after visiting a soldier whom he describes as young, pretty, almost like a girl. The juxtaposition is striking and suggestive.

But this isn't how Whitman's actual notebook appears, as the LOC scans indicate. Instead Whitman includes material about soldiers--fascinating, important, moving--at the beginning of the notebook, and then at the end, where he found some remaining blank pages, he dumped his literary works and thoughts. He has some notes on Dante's Inferno two pages before the spider image; Whitman said that he took Dante's hellish book into the hell of the hospitals. Then we get the "Noiseless Patient Spider" early draft jottings, and after that we get some lines on "Quicksand Years" and some thoughts for proposed other poems.

Click below to see Library of Congress scans of Whitman's original 1862 notebook #94 (please note that page number sequence omissions reflect blank pages in Whitman's notebook):

Page 182
Page 187
Page 189
Page 200
Page 201
Page 205
Page 207
Page 209