Can anyone help me make express my thesis statement succinctly? Compare and contrast "A Noiseless Patient Spider vs. "Dover Beach."Although both...

In Walt Whitman's poem, "A Noiseless Patient Spider," I
don't think this admirer of nature is seeing humans as insignificant. Actually, I
believe he is looking to nature to be inspired as a human being who is struggling in a
large world to reach out, much the way the spider is struggling to reach out in his
microcosm. I do agree with your
statement:

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Whitman finds liberation through defining the
vast universe that surrounds
him.

On the other hand,
Arnold sees the glass as half-empty. According to an analysis of the poem, "Dover Beach"
is about a man with a woman—in their room—on the coast of England looking out over the
water in the direction of France, seeing the lights, the beach, etc. He and his lover
both look out at the scene which is compelling and
calm.

The hidden sadness that the man feels comes to him as
he listens to the water pulling pebbles on the beach back and forth with the tide, when
he remembers something from Sophocles who had had a similar experience at the water,
only to think not of the beauty of the moment, but of human
suffering. This is certainly enough to ruin the sense of well-being the
speaker has been sharing with his lover.

This poem reflects
the changing of the times, when faith and religion were no longer at the center of
civilization, and the thought leaves the speaker feeling empty and perhaps frightened.
It is in this state of mind that he turns to his lover and pleads that they share their
love and loyalty with each other, as something stable to hold on to during these
changing times.

Written in 1867, England is beginning to
see the glimmering of their Industrial Revolution. And as man becomes more impressed
with technology and science, he starts to forget God—seemingly as a society. I believe
this is what Arnold (and many poets, especially the Romantics) were responding to:
losing one's soul to technology, etc.

You may be correct in
thinking that the speaker in "Dover Beach" is detaching himself from a world that no
longer looks familiar to him. He may feel adrift in a world that makes little sense to
him. This is a timeless theme.

So if I understand what you
are getting at, my thesis statement would be something like the
following.

In
Walt Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient Spider," and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," both
speakers are considering the world in which they live; however where Whitman sees the
world as a place of limitless possibilities in acquiring knowledge—a universe that he
wishes to reach out to—Arnold sees a world corrupted by advancements in knowledge and
technology, believing that the world offers no stability other than what man can achieve
with people rather than the world at large, and he turns away from interaction with the
universe.

I hope I have
captured the essence of what you are looking for. I think you have two good points to
contrast here with these poems.