A Noiseless Patient Spider, by Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman in 1887

In A Noiseless Patient Spider, a poem published in 1867 as part of Walt Whitman's masterpiece Leaves of Grass, the poet discovers that a spider has something to teach him.

In the first stanza, the poet observes the spider. The spider is isolated, standing on a promontory, a little piece of rock jutting out into the air, the space surrounding it "vacant" and "vast." Poor spider, so tiny and alone in the big universe!

It sends filaments, silky threads that it uses to build its web, out into the vast, vacant space around it. The spider is all alone, and there seems to be nothing around it, yet it keeps on trying to make contact with something outside of itself. This isn't easy; the space is so vast. Yet the spider keeps on trying. It is "patient." It is "noiseless" - it doesn't protest or complain about the difficulty of its task. It doesn't get tired. It just keeps on sending "filament, filament, filament" out into the world.

"My Parents Kept Me From Children Who Were Rough" by Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender

"My Parents Kept Me From Children Who Were Rough" deals with class differences. The adult poet looks back at how it felt to be a child whose middle-class parents warned him to stay away from the "rough" working-class boys.

The poem's narrator is ambivalent. Like his parents, he is afraid of the rough boys, but he also feels a mixture of attraction, jealousy, and shame.

The poem begins, "My parents kept me from children who were rough." It would have been more accurate to say that his parents tried to keep him from children who were rough, because his parents weren't able to keep their son and the rough children apart.

The rough children follow the narrator on the road, imitating his lisp. They pin him down -- "their knees tight on [his] arms" -- or at least he feared that they would. There is a gap between his parents' intentions and the reality of his life.

"The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carols Williams

William Carlos Williams in 1921

The 1932 poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" is the most famous poem that the doctor/poet William Carlos Williams wrote. It's in many anthologies, where it is usually the shortest poem, unless the anthology also happens to contain haiku.

It consists of one sentence, broken up into four two-line stanzas. Everything after the first stanza depicts a concrete image: "a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens." What stands out the most, on first reading, are the colors - the red wheelbarrow, the white chickens. The image is simple and soothing, and has a Zen-like quality. All the words are short, only one or two syllables each (wheelbarrow and rainwater, of course, are normally three syllables, but in the poem they are each written as two words, which keeps the maximum syllable count to two). The simplicity and directness of the words add to the Zen feeling.

"The Magic Barrel" by Bernard Malamud

Love and redemption - these are the concerns of Bernard Malamud's masterpiece "The Magic Barrel." In this classic short story written in the 1950s, a rabbinical student, who may or may not love God, meets an old-time matchmaker who smells like fish and may or may not have supernatural powers.

Leo Finkle, the rabbinical student, decides he needs a wife. With considerable trepidation, he contacts Pinye Salzman, the matchmaker, who eagerly describes an array of women. Leo finds fault with all of them. Finally, after a disastrous date arranged by the matchmaker, Leo discovers a photograph, seemingly left with the others by accident.

Malamud describes the moment in lyrical language: "Her face deeply moved him. Why, he could at first not say. It gave him the impression of youth - spring flowers, yet age - a sense of having been used to the bone, wasted; this came from the eyes, which were hauntingly familiar, yet absolutely strange ... she leaped forth to his heart - had *lived,* or wanted to ... it could be seen in the depths of those reluctant eyes, and from the way the light enclosed and shone from her, and within her, opening realms of possibility: this was her own. Her he desired."

And yet, "he received an impression, somehow, of evil. He shuddered, saying softly, it is thus with us all .... Only such a one could understand him and help him seek whatever he was seeking."