Summary and Form
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
movement—out, over, down, up, from—which 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.
Commentary
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 coming-of-age
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 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.
