SG Whitman Out of The Cradle

Stan.
tk Study Guide
Walt Whitman, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

(1) BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
For biographical information on Walt Whitman, please refer to the “Song of Myself” Study Guide, or visit
Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman, a host of other websites, or read the
biographical note on Whitman in Radeljković's “American Topics” (listed underneath in the Recommended
Reading list).
(2) TEXT OF WORK

Read the poem with annotations at: http://www.bartleby.com/142/212.html
(3) ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY (includes summary of poem)

This poem was written in 1859 and incorporated into the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. It
describes a young boy's awakening as a poet, mentored by nature and his own maturing consciousness.
The poem is loose in its form, except for the sections that purport to be a transcript of the bird's call,
which are musical in their repetition of words and phrases. The opening of the poem is marked by an
abundance of repeated prepositions describing movementout, over, down, up, fromwhich appear
regularly later in the poem and which convey the sense of a struggle, in this case the poet's struggle to come
to consciousness.
Unlike most of Whitman's poems, "Out of the Cradle" has a fairly distinct plot line. A
young boy watches a pair of birds nesting on the beach near his home, and marvels at their relationship to
one another. One day the female bird fails to return. The male stays near the nest, calling for his lost
mate. The male's cries touch something in the boy, and he seems to be able to translate what the bird is
saying. Brought to tears by the bird's pathos, he asks nature to give him the one word "superior to all." In
the rustle of the ocean at his feet, he discerns the word "death," which continues, along with the bird's
song, to have a presence in his poetry.
This is another poem that links Whitman to the Romantics. The "birth of the poet" genre was of
particular importance to Wordsworth, whose massive Prelude details his artistic comingofage in detail.
Like Wordsworth, Whitman claims to take his inspiration from nature. Where Wordsworth is inspired by a
wordless feeling of awe, though, Whitman finds an opportunity to anthropomorphize, and nature
gives him very specific answers to his questions about overarching concepts. Nature is a tabula
rasa onto which the poet can project himself. He conquers it, inscribes it. While it may become a part of
him that is always present, the fact that it does so seems to be by his permission.
The epiphany surrounding the word "death" seems appropriate, for in other poems of Whitman's
we have seen death described as the ultimate tool for democracy and sympathy. Here death is shown to
be the one lesson a child must learn, whether from nature or from an elder. Only the realization
of death can lead to emotional and artistic maturity. Death, for one as interested as Whitman in the place
of the individual in the universe, is a means for achieving perspective: while your thoughts may seem
profound and unique in the moment, you are a mere speck in existence. Thus the contemplation of death
allows for one to move beyond oneself, to consider the whole. Perhaps this is why the old crone disrupts
the end of the poem: she symbolizes an alternative possibility, the means by which someone else may have
come to the same realization as Whitman. In the end the bird, although functionally important in
Whitman's development, is insignificant in the face of the abstract sea: death, which is the concept he
introduces, remains as the important factor.
Thus although "Out of the Cradle" can be described as a poem about the birth of the poet, it can
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Stan.tk Study Guide – Walt Whitman, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
also be read as a poem about the death of the self. In the end, on the larger scale, these two phenomena are
one and the same.
(SparkNotes)
A fairly intimate analysis of Whitman's poetic use of rhythm in the poem:

The poem would address an unseen listener, an unseen audience. It does so through the rhetoric of
address since the message in the bottle seems to be speaking to the poet alone, or to a muse, a friend, a
lover, an abstraction, an object in nature. . . . It seems to be speaking to God or to no one. Rhetoric comes
into play here, the radical of presentation, the rhythm of words creating a deep sensation in the
reader. Rhythm would lift the poem off the page, it would bewitch the sounds of language, hypnotize the
words into memorable phrases. Rhythm creates a pattern of yearning and expectation, of recurrence and
difference. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. [Connect with ideas of life and
death mentioned in the SparkNotes analysis!] It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves.
It differentiates us; it unites us to the cosmos.
Rhythm is a form cut into time, as Ezra Pound said in ABC of Reading. It is the combination in
English of stressed and unstressed syllables that creates a feeling of fixity and flux, of surprise and
inevitability. Rhythm is all about recurrence and change. It is poetry’s way of charging the depths, hitting
the fathomless. It is oceanic. I would say with Robert Graves that there is a rhythm of emotions that
conditions the musical rhythms, that mental bracing and relaxing which comes to us through our
sensuous impressions. It is the emotion—the very rhythm of the emotion—that determines the texture of
the sounds.
I like to feel the sea drift, the liturgical cadence [Remember that Whitman's free verse is
cadenced!] of the first stanza of Whitman's “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” It is one sentence and
twentytwo lines long. It always carries me away.
[Here goes the first stanza of the poem]
The incantatory power of this is tremendous as the repetitions loosen the intellect for reverie. It
seems to me that Whitman creates here the very rhythm of a singular reminiscence emerging out of the
depths of mind, out of the sea waves and the rocking cradle, out of all the undifferentiated sensations of
infancy, out of the myriad memories of childhood, out of all possible experiences the formative event of a
boy leaving the safety of his bed and walking the seashore alone, moving “Out,” “Over,” “Down,” “Up,”
“From,” exchanging the safety of the indoors for the peril of the outdoors, facing his own vague yearnings
and the misty void, mixing his own tears and the salt spray of the ocean, listening to the birds,
understanding the language—the calling—of one bird. He walks the shore on the edge of the world, the
edge of the unknown. He has entered the space that Emerson calls “I and the Abyss,” the space of the
American sublime.
In this region: out of all potential words, these words alone; out of all potential memories, this
memory alone. It is the emerging rhythm itself that creates the Proustian sensation of being in two places
at once, “A man, yet by these tears a little boy again, / Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the
waves.” Whitman creates through the rhetorical rhythm of these lines the very urgency of fundamental
memory triggered and issuing forth. He splits himself off and moves seamlessly between the third person
and the first person. And as the bird chanted to him (“From the memories of the bird that chanted to me”)
so he chants to us (“I, chanter of pains and joys”). This is a poem of poetic vocation.
It is telling that Whitman builds to the selfcommand, “A reminiscence sing.” He memorializes the
memory in song. There is an element of lullaby in this poem, the lulling motion of the waves, the consoling
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Stan.tk Study Guide – Walt Whitman, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
sound of the sea. But this is a lullaby that wounds (as García Lorca said about Spanish lullabies), a
lullaby of sadness that permeates the very universe itself, a lullaby that moves from chanting to singing.
Paul Valory calls the passage from prose to verse, from speech to song, from walking to dancing, “a
moment that is at once action and dream.” Whitman creates such a moment here. He would spin an
enchantment beyond pain and joy, he would become the poetic shaman who authors that reminiscence for
us, who magically summons up the experience in us.
(PoetryFoundation.org)
(4) SOURCES CITED
“Whitman's Poetry: 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” SparkNotes. 9 Nov. 2008
<http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/whitman/section4.rhtml>.
Hirsch, Edward. “Guidebook: Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” PoetryFoundation.org. 9 Nov. 2008
<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/feature.guidebook.html?id=177217>.
(5) RECOMMENDED READING
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” CliffsNotes.

<http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/LeavesofGrassFromCalamusOutoftheCradle
EndlesslyRocking.id60,pageNum38.html>
(A short but interesting analysis discussing the poem as an elegy and focusing on its symbolism and
language.)
Ed. Ann Woodlief. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” American Transcendentalism Web. 1999.
Studies in American Transcendentalism.
<http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/roots/legacy/whitman/cradleweb.html>.
(Includes the text of whole poem with analysis and commentary on specific parts. To access commentary,
click on boldfaced words and expressions in poem. Also refer to main page on Whitman for more information
about the author, his poetry, and the historical and cultural context in which he lived.)
Radeljković, Zvonimir. “The Comprehensive Walt Whitman.” American Topics: Essays in American
Literature. Sarajevo: Buybook, 2005.
(The essay includes a comprehensive analysis of Walt Whitman's work with special emphasis on “Song of
Myself” and ties in Whitman's work well with his Transcendentalist/Emersonian influences. Also refer to
page 360 for a more intimate account of Walt Whitman's biography.)
End of Stan.tk Study Guide

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Stan.

Walt Whitman, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

(2) TEXT OF WORK

(3) ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY (includes summary of poem)

A fairly intimate analysis of Whitman's poetic use of rhythm in the poem:

[Here goes the first stanza of the poem]

(4) SOURCES CITED

(5) RECOMMENDED READING

“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” CliffsNotes.

End of Stan.tk Study Guide

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