Echos of Love

Echos of Love

Gently.
I look, touch love
and find again something...
miraculous.
Grateful moments,
part of life
dissipated, isolated.
The final end is clear.

An entry for September 6th round of "The Daily Poem" 
Prompt: Redaction Poetry
Prompt used:
Walt Whitman, From Poetry Analysis ▼

Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,
Whispering, I love you, before long I die,
I have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you,
For I could not die till I once look’d on you,
For I fear’d I might afterward lose you.

In this lesser-known piece, Walt Whitman describes the last words of a narrator’s dying lover and his assurances they will find one another again in the rolling ocean. The poem begins with the speaker telling his reader that someone, like a single drop from the ocean, “came” to him. This is something that seems miraculous to the speaker. He is grateful to have found someone to spend his last moments with. He is part of the circle of life and death, and by the end of the poem, the fear associated with entering into the afterlife has dissipated.

A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

In ‘A Noiseless Patient Spider,’ the speaker spends the poem watching a spider. It is on a rock overlooking the ocean. Although it is small, the impact on the area and the speaker is clear. It weaves a complex, beautiful web. The speaker pays close attention to how, string by string, the spider completes its task.

By the end of the poem, the larger importance of the text as a metaphor is made clear. The final{{/b}x} lines conclude the poem, but they are very open-ended. He says that he sees the spider and its web as a metaphor for his soul, but what exactly he means by this isn’t clear.

Your poem must be a minimum of 8 lines.
Form: Free Verse
Line Count: 8