Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

(1859)

“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” is one of Whitman’s most powerful and moving poems, a poem in which he dramatizes (or imagines) the original moment of his poetic calling. With the title “A Word out of the Sea” the poem appeared in the New York Saturday Press on December 24, 1859, being presented by the magazine as “our Christmas or New Year’s present” to its readers. With revisions and a new title, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” found its permanent placement in the 1881 edition at the beginning of the “Sea Drift” cluster.

The poem opens with the poet as a boy going down to the seashore on Long Island (Paumanok) one evening and listening to the singing of two mockingbirds from Alabama. The he-bird sings carols of love to his she-bird, but soon the she-bird is lost or killed, and the he-bird’s song turns to a sorrowful elegy of loss and despair. The boy interprets these sorrowful songs, and the grown poet “translates” them into the poem. From this empathic moment the boy awakens to a realization of all the sorrowful songs sung by “thousands” around the world, and he realizes what he was made for, to give voice to these sorrowful voices. Yet one thing more remains. What is the reason for this world sorrow; how does one make sense of it? The poet turns toward the sea and realizes that the sea, imagined as an old woman rocking her cradle, has been whispering the answer all the while, hissing the one “word final, superior to all”: “Death, death, death, death, death.”

Formally, the poem is a tour de force, masterfully employing devices from music and opera, such as pattern repetition and echoing, along with Whitman’s trademark anaphora and parallelism and a rhythm that employs all of these to a climatic ending on the riveting word death. The opening verse paragraph demonstrates many of these strategies: “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, / Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle, / Out of the Ninth-month midnight”—a litany of anaphoric phrases that continue through twenty-two lines. The subject of the sentence, I, is suspended until line 20, and the verb of the sentence is withheld until the very end of this single-sentence paragraph, closing line 22 with the bardic verb sing. It is a masterpiece of syntactic suspense carried out in a rhythmically natural voice. Similarly the songs of the mockingbird, called “arias” in the poem, employ powerful devices of echoing and repetition. Stanza 1 of the joyful song begins, “Shine! shine! shine! ” The next stanza begins, “Two together! ” Stanza 1 of the sorrowful aria begins, “Blow! blow! blow! ”, and following stanzas begin: “Soothe! soothe! soothe! ”; “Loud! loud! loud!; “Land! land! land!. These repetitions prepare the reader for the bird’s climactic ending of his song: “Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved! ”, which in turn prepares the reader for the climactic ending of the poem: “Death, death, death, death, death”.

Scholars have interpreted the meaning of this poem in various ways. One reading sees the poem as an assertion that “death is the mother of beauty, ” as the poet Wallace Stevens wrote in his poem “Sunday Morning.” The sea’s answer is no answer at all, only a bell tolling the inevitable, universal fact of death, and the inconsolable lover and poet can do nothing but sing, nothing but create art in response to tragedy. Others interpret the poem psychologically. According to Sigmund Freud, an infant in the womb and in early life experiences feelings of “oceanic bliss” in its relation to the mother but inevitably undergoes the loss of this blissful union. According to what Freud called the Oedipal complex the male child must eventually break from the desire to return to the mother and identify with the father to become a functioning adult. Critics who read the poem in this way see the bird’s loss as a symbol of Whitman’s loss of his own mother union, or perhaps the loss of a lover (a mother substitute). But here the poet transcends his narcissistic desire for the mother by universalizing his experience through a creative identification with the suffering of others.

Still others emphasize the process of translation itself in the poem, emphasizing that the poet learns how to become a poet, how to translate personal experience into a language available to others. He finds his own voice only by translating the words of another singer, who is himself a mockingbird, imitating others. This endless process of translation becomes the ultimate meaning of the poem. In yet another reading, inflected by Whitman’s transcendental or mystical vision, death in the poem is a spiritual, psychological event necessary for a (re)-birth of the poet-prophet that Whitman presents himself to be in poems like “Song of Myself.” In this reading the word death then is not tragic, but transforming. Particularly important is the final line, “The sea whisper’d me” not “whispered to me” (emphases added), emphasizing that the self is reborn as the child of the sea, as the sea is a symbol for what Whitman calls the “fluid and swallowing soul.”

Each of these interpretations finds evidence in the poem. Understood through the lens of any of these interpretations or others, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” remains one of the most haunting, powerful poems in the language, a poem that is both an elegiac response to death and an evocative, imaginative recounting of the birth of a poetic life.