SIXTEEN

DEMON OR BIRD

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Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”—published first in a journal in 1859, and then in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as “A Word Out of the Sea”—is one of the strangest and most haunting of American poems, and a startling inquiry into why we make art. The poem begins with an evocation of a remembered night’s walk through fields and woods near the center of Long Island, down to the shore: a landscape of Whitman’s childhood, more than a century before that land became the deracinated expanse of suburb and strip mall it is today. This nocturnal excursion is narrated in one gloriously extended sentence, layered and crystalline, and occupies a stanza unto itself.

Whitman’s opening lines are usually lucid, encapsulating what’s to come the way an orator might begin by sketching an argument. But this walk to the shore, the boundary between the solid and the unstable, between what we know and what we don’t, begins in a luminous swirl and scramble. The poem starts by placing and disorienting us at once, setting us unmoored in a wild night of instruction. Birdsong and the ceaseless sound of the September sea called the boy to the beach at night, and call down the years to the adult poet’s memory, bringing him to a place of origin, the desolate ground where, he will learn, all songs begin.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,

Out of the Ninth-month midnight,

Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wandered alone, bareheaded, barefoot,

Down from the showered halo,

Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive,

Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,

From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,

From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,

From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,

From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,

From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,

From the myriad thence-aroused words,

From the word stronger and more delicious than any,

From such as now they start the scene revisiting,

As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,

Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,

A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,

Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,

I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,

Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,

A reminiscence sing.

Whitman’s syntax creates a driving but fractured motion, as if we’re viewing this scene through a prism of memory that breaks time into planes of light and action. Three lines begin with out, telling us this meditation comes from the sound of waves, from the music of a mockingbird, and from a September midnight. But then the pattern shifts, and the next four lines commence with over, down, up—and out again; this scramble of prepositions mimic the boy’s path to the shore, but more than that they blur action and agency; this is a physical world inextricable from one lit up by the movements of the spirit. Down from the showered halo/Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive suggests a mist-ringed moon and a walk through a fantastic leaf-shadow realm, but it also evokes a soul coming into being, that which has descended from above and rises into new life out of the womb, the Ninth-month midnight.

Eight lines begin with from, a list of origins of this reminiscence that swiftly turns into an exploration of the sources of this poem, and of poetry, which is made of the thousand responses of my heart never to cease. Whitman makes a startlingly modern gesture, overtly including in this poem the moment of its composition, when from the myriad thence-aroused words . . . from such as now they start the scene revisiting . . . That now is the moment when he first inscribes the words that come

As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,

Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly . . .

What an alive, anxious description of how it must have felt to write this poem, the possible words hurrying, calling out, streaming as if through the air, carried by some wind that will, if he’s not quick enough, sweep them away! But it’s equally possible to read that the speaker’s the one who is “borne hither,” drawn to the birdsong, to the rush of language and the shoreline of vision not by volition but by some signature inscribed within him, an undeniable imperative.

The game this sentence plays with time is dazzling. It remembers a moment in the past while making elements of that moment—a walk to the beach—feel timeless, figures for a soul’s coming into being. It gradually reveals itself as a chronicle not of one walk to the shore but of many and ongoing ones, and then it establishes a present, the moment of its composition and the moment in which we are reading it. These two nows unfold side by side, parallel lines separated by an elastic amount of time between them. For the writer, the moment is receding before the ink of the words that inscribe it has dried. That distance increases as the poem travels further from the writer’s hand into print, into the attention of readers, into the silence of libraries. If you could hear this distance in time as it lengthens I think it would have a deepening sonority, a piece for solo cello growing more gravid and resonant.

Whenever a reader picks up the poem and lends it voice, silently or aloud, the moment of composition is, as it were, restored, lit up before a background of elapsed time. For the poet, the poem fuses here and hereafter; for readers the “present” of the text is our past, and its “future” our present. Whitman understood this paradox, and put it to remarkable use, addressing an audience he rightly anticipated would appear, and establishing his own voice in a position of startling atemporality. For the reader, the sound the poem makes is that of a door gliding open. As in Dickinson: You there—I here—with just the Door ajar.

IN ITS CONTINUOUS CHARACTER, its unbroken, repetitive movements, this sentence evokes the shoreline itself, in the forward rushes of sound, the feeling of small retreats, a line of water breaking into foam, a line of thinking revising and regrouping, now qualified, now urgent . . . But enough.

“OUT OF THE CRADLE Endlessly Rocking” is a libretto for a two-character opera, a feverishly theatrical one. The boy who’ll grow up to speak the human part of the poem comes to the beach, each day, to hear the song of a pair of nesting birds, studying them intently, peering, absorbing, translating. The last verb in the list is key; even before he understands the nature of his calling, the young man is already acting as a poet, turning experience into language, importing the unreadable into the realm of words.

Translating is also a crucial verb here because, in the very next line, the birds begin to speak. We’re offered an italicized translation of their tune, whose spirit and intent the listener understands. The birds sing of their union, undaunted by winds and weather or where in the world they are, minding no time/While we two keep together.

Love makes them unmindful of time, but of course time is likewise unmindful of them. The she-bird disappears. Thenceforward, the poet tells us

. . . all summer in the sound of the sea,

And at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather,

Over the hoarse surging of the sea,

Or flitting from brier to brier by day,

I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird . . .

The young poet hears an elegy, a lamentation of extraordinary beauty. The Orphic bird pour’d forth the meanings which I of all men know, he tells us, in a phrase that collapses any separation between the listening boy and the remembering man. Enraptured by such grave beauty, the boy returns repeatedly, careful to make no disturbance, so as not to interrupt the song.

I have treasured every note,

For more than once dimly down to the beach gliding,

Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the shadows,

Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights after their sorts,

The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,

I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,

Listened long and long.

What a gloriously gothic passage! Moonbeams, the breakers tossing their foam like the white waving arms of the drowned, obscure shadows hiding a sleepless, barefoot boy enchanted by a gorgeous outpouring of grief. Entirely rapt, the boy is listening to keep—a deft description of the poet’s attention to the world. If “hearing” is essentially a passive experience in which we receive whatever sounds are audible, then “listening” implies a spectrum of action: concentrating, submitting, discerning, identifying, categorizing, noticing nuance, “translating” the emotive and intellectual meanings of music into language—meanings we both apprehend and create.

The boy Whitman must indeed have listened long, as the bird launches into a bravura set-piece: a sixty-two-line lament, punctuated by forty-one exclamation points. The bird’s stacked apostrophes (O night! . . . O rising stars! . . . throat! O trembling throat!) become increasingly fevered:

Shake out carols!

Solitary here, the night’s carols!

Carols of lonesome love! death’s carols!

Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!

O under that moon where she drops almost down into the sea!

O reckless despairing carols.

In notebook entries sketching out the poetic principles of his first edition, Whitman enjoined himself to employ a perfectly transparent, plate-glassy style, artless; he favored clearness, simplicity, no twistified or foggy sentences. “Out of the Cradle” is twistified and fogged right and left, its sentences bending time and doubling back upon themselves. Surely one of its sources is Poe, with his creaking spirit-bird whose single word seals a loss inside the unyielding passage of time. The other is grand opera, those sumptuous pageants in which neither feeling nor vocal ornament is restrained. Whitman resisted European opera at first, preferring an American music more direct and, he thought, readily accessible. But the influx of thrilling Italian opera singers who began to appear in New York in 1847 won him over entirely. The many greats included Alesssandro Bettini, thought to be the tenor characterized in these lines from “Song of Myself:”

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,

The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

Whitman’s feel for the physicality of music, the bodily transformations involved for both performer and listener, is on superb display here. No singer compelled him more than Marietta Alboni, a contralto who also sang soprano roles, and who “used to sweep me away as with whirlwinds,” he said. For Whitman, opera is rapture, a mode of lifting the self up and out. I hear the trained soprano, he writes, again in “Song of Myself,”

The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,

It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possessed them.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, the great German poet who bridges Symbolism and the modern era, was sixteen years old when Walt Whitman died. In the ninth of his Duino Elegies, he speaks of the importance of our relationship to the objects of this world and our responsibility to “translate” them into ourselves, through seeing and naming them so completely that some essence of them dwells within us. Toward the end of the elegy, he addresses the earth, here in Stephen Mitchell’s translation:

Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,

Invisible? Isn’t it your dream

To be wholly invisible someday?—O Earth: invisible!

What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?

What does being on earth ask of us? The world wants to be rescued from evanescence, to be translated into an immaterial realm that does not perish because it was never exactly alive. To become, in other words, poetry—either in the poem the poet writes out of engagement with things, or in the interior “poem” of anyone who loves the world, the never-said words we come, over time, to carry within us. Rilke’s reply to the earth’s command is one of the loveliest sentences I know, in the original German, and in English: Erde, du liebe, ich will. Earth, my love, I will.

Whitman is thought of as a poet of exuberance, and rightly so. He pledges affection without reserve, and makes bold claims (I am the poet of the body, and I am the poet of the soul) without qualification. But his account of the experience of hearing the world’s call, the moment of receiving his calling, is far more ambiguous than Rilke’s affirmation. Whitman’s conflicted myth of origin may well be the most emotionally ambiguous moment in all his work. The song that makes the boy want and need to sing begins and ends in pain; its singer cannot be consoled. But the certain knowledge it imparts to the poet is thrilling. Who among us is ever able to say, as the poet does, now in a moment I know what I am for?

But this knowledge is childhood’s end. The work of the adult artist rises within him. Never more shall I escape, he tells us, launching a cascade of never more’s that echo the single, awful word of the raven that forecast, fifteen years earlier, another American poet’s fate.

Never more shall the reverberations,

Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,

Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was . . .

Now he knows what he is for: to be a solitary singer charged with naming all that’s passing, raising a song commensurate with the love of what vanishes. This means to be forever unsatisfied, since no song can be entirely adequate, and no accounting of loss restore what’s gone.

. . . before what there in the night

Under the yellow and sagging moon,

The dusky demon aroused—the fire, the sweet hell within,

The unknown want, the destiny of me.

The bird—demonic now in its power to compel, to bring the boy’s true nature to the fore and charge him with purpose he is not free to refuse—presents an understanding of the poet’s work more troubled than any Whitman would have articulated before. The poet can neither turn away from death nor complete the endless work of elegy. And therefore come a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours. No one song will do, no word hold what it is to love what disappears, which is to say what it is to be human, and therefore the only choice (since silence is unbearable, to one who whose purpose is to sing) is more songs, more words, more attempts to this time get it right.

What persists, no matter what is said or sung or written, is the gap between the words and the world, and it is the destiny of me to address it, the unknown want: the need, desire, compulsion, privilege, or joy to sing into that space, the unsayable. Under the spell of my dusky demon and brother, the poet makes his book.

IN THE VERY FIRST SENTENCE of the poem, Whitman hinted at the word stronger and more delicious than any, and he returns to that word after the boy has been confirmed in his vocation. Then the word rises, whispering over and over: death, spoken with a kind of longing, as the speaker is laved in the word by the sea.

My own songs, awaked from that hour,

And with them the key, the word up from the waves,

The word of the sweetest song, and all songs . . .

This awareness of death, a profound fascination with it, is the fifth of Whitman’s sources. It seems paradoxical, for death to be generative; but for him this darkness, fountaining and still at once, is the necessary presence that mothers all songs.