SUMMARY OF THE CRADLE ENDLESS ROCKING
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 touched 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. In the crackle of the ocean at his feet, he recognizes the word death, which continues, along with the bird’s song, to have a presence in his poetry. Out of the ceaselessly rocking cradle of the sea waves, a memory comes back to the poet. He recalls that as a child, he left his bed and strolled alone in search of the mysteries of life and death. He is a man now but he uses all his experiences but goes beyond them.
The experience he now recalls is that on the Paumanok seashore one May, when mauves were in bloom, he observed two mockingbirds. The birds sang of their love; the words “two together” summed up their existence. One day the female disappeared the male anxiously awaited her, He addressed the wind: I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me. His song pierced the heart of the inquisitive boy who cherished every note for he understood the meaning of the bird, whom he called his brother. The bird’s lament affected the boy deeply. Every shadow seemed to the bird the hoped-for shape of his mate reappearing.
The notes of the bird were reverberated by the moaning sea, the fierce old mother. To the boy who became the poet, to the out setting poet, the sea hinted at secrets. The boy eagerly asked the sea to let him know the crucial meaning, the word-final, and superior to all. Before daybreak, the sea whispered to the poet the “delicious word death. In this experience, the boy attempted to temper the vision of the sea with that of the bird, and this awareness marked the beginning of the poet in him. The bird, the lonely singer, was a projection of the boy’s consciousness. The sea, like the “old crone rocking the cradle,” whispered the keyword in his ears.
This poem was first published under the title “A Child’s Reminiscence” (1859), was later called “A Word out of the Sea” (1860), and the present, highly symbolic title was given it in 1871. The present title suggests “a word from the sea,” and that word is death, which is the second phase in the process of birth and rebirth.
The poem, composition is thought to be based on an intensely personal experience of the poet. What that experience was is a preferred but fruitless field of assumption for Whitman’s biographers. The poem asserts the triumph of eternal life over death. The meaning of the poem is not stated openly, but it springs naturally from a memory of the narrator’s childhood days. Whitman creatively recreates the childhood experience of this inquiring man and also shows how the boy becomes a man, and the man, a bard. This time sequence is of essence to the poem as is the growth of the awareness of the poet.
Memory plays an important part in this dramatic development. First, the boy tries to absorb the moving song of the mockingbird. Later, the boy swaps the bird as an important character in the poem because he attempts to fuse the substance of the bird’s song with the secret emanating from the sea; this fusion is of the essence in his poetry. The word “death” is “delicious” because it is a prerequisite for rebirth.
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” is one of Whitman’s great poems because of his use of image and symbol. The title itself is a symbol of birth. The sun and the moon, the land and the sea, and the stars and the sea waves contribute to the atmosphere and symbolic scenery in the poem. These images deepen the effect of the emotions in the poem, as in the bird’s song, and are part of the dramatic structure.
