Whitman's Poetics of Memory in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

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

Whitman’s Poetics of Memory in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

As readers and critics have long intuited, Walt Whitman fancies himself the poet of the future. Eerily yet matter-of-factly, entreatingly yet confidently, Whitman’s multivalent, polymorphically-perverse poetic “I” often looks forward by employing a poetic fiction of looking backward. In other words, Whitman’s poetic voice has a tendency to speak from out of a liminal, immemorial “space” that is always already anticipating the reader. Among all of his real and imagined orientations, then, Whitman is generally future oriented – the later Whitman even exaggeratedly so.1 Perhaps because of this undeniable forward thrust of Whitman’s poetry, few critics have noted the richness with which some of Whitman’s poems – the Sea-Drift poems in particular – explore the complex workings of human memory. In “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” the human act of re-membering, of putting back together the “thousand warbling echoes” (392) of the lived-in past, merges with the self-reflective poetic act. Whitman’s poem thus offers readers a poetics of memory, one that remembers the act of remembering, as it were, and in so doing reveals memory itself to be an inherently poetic activity: memory as poiesis. If the late Whitman views the future as an abstract locus of poetic and democratic revolutions, the earlier Whitman sees the past as an imaginative topos where loss and desire come together to form the poetic impulse. To sing the poet’s memorial engagement with the past, Whitman’s poem implies, is to confront the “pains and joys” (388) of Love and Death, those two ultimately inseparable primal realities at the heart of the human condition.

Edward Hirsch insightfully claims that “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” formally creates the “very rhythm of a singular reminiscence emerging out of the depths of mind… Whitman creates through the rhetorical rhythm of these lines the very urgency of fundamental memory triggered and issuing forth” (22). Hirsch does not specifically name the prosodic techniques in Whitman’s poem that “loosen the intellect for reverie” (Hirsch 22), that rhythmically rock the reader back and forth into a kind of active dream state that is the sine qua non of memory as poiesis, but some of these techniques can indeed be made explicit. Rhythm in free verse, though subtle and seemingly immune to formal analysis, nevertheless results from precise poetic effects. The anaphora of the first three lines (“Out of”) combines with internal metrical echoes – note the dactyl plus trochee pattern that splits the ten-syllable first line into two echoing, mirroring halves, thus creating in effect the ghost of a caesura in the medial position ("Out of the cradle endlessly rocking"); the dactyl-trochee pattern recurs at the end of the second line (“musical shuttle”) – to create a sense of regularity within difference that immediately evokes in the first three lines the calm movement, the dreamy activity that the poem as a whole describes. Additionally the rapid flights of human memory, which proceed not logically but “[a]s a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing” (388), are imitated by an incredible prepositional energy released by the first word of consecutive lines: Out, Over, Down, Up, and From variously flitter about as the opening words of the first fifteen lines. As James Hillman claims in his psycho-linguistic analysis of the poetic imagination, prepositions both precisely position the reader in an imaginative scene and make propositions about the relational matrices at work within (or alongside, or underneath…) that scene. Hillman writes: “So, we never seem to catch imagination operating on its own and we never can circumscribe its place because it works through, behind, within, upon, below our faculties. An overtone and undersense: is imagination prepositional?” (175) The prepositions in Whitman’s poem indirectly suggest through the poem’s manner of proceeding that memory is fundamentally imaginative movement, imagination rhythmically rocking back and forth so that it can prepositionally dart where its memorial whims take it.

If the formal aspects of “Out of the Cradle” imitate the ebb and flow of memory’s imaginative flights in general, the content of the poem directly recounts a specific act of memory that is complexly doubled back upon itself. The poetic voice revisits a childhood scene in which “the child / leaving his bed wander’d alone” (388) down to the sea, where he heard the mockingbird’s mournful song. The poetic voice thus conjures up his reminiscenceFrom 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. (388)

In the line “From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,” “memories” functions in an ambiguous, double sense: on the one hand, it refers to the poetic voice’s memories of the bird that he heard as a child down by the sea; on the other hand, though, the “memories of the bird” must be taken as the bird’s own memories of his vanished loved one, the content of the bird’s song. The poet is therefore remembering the bird’s memories, turning memory upon itself so that its imaginal ground can be recovered and re-membered. In the last four lines of the first stanza, memory’s double movement is so successful that the poetic voice becomes indistinguishable from his childhood past. In the hands of the poet, memory unites dream and action so as to bring the past directly into the present of the poem: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. (388)

Note that the past and present are united by the poet “by these tears,” as if memory remembered itself only by recollecting the timeless ache in its heart. The above final lines of the first stanza also initiate a process in which the poet’s own song merges with the song of the bird. From the “beginning notes of yearning and love” sung by the bird in memorial longing for his mate, the poet sings the “pains and joys” of memory writ large. For the rest of the poem, the poet and the bird, the rememberer and the memory, remain virtually indistinguishable.

As absorbed and translated by the poet, the song of the bird expresses yearning for the bird’s mate, now vanished. Because of the present absence of the beloved, the past becomes the “object” of the bird’s loss and desire, the place simultaneously out of which and to which his mournful memory sings. In an apostrophe that contains one of the most stunning uses of epizeuxis ever utilized by a bird (much less a poet), Whitman’s bird addresses the past directly:O past! O happy life! O song of joy!
In the air, in the woods, over fields,
Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!
But my mate no more, no more with me!
We two together no more. (392)

The haunting past participle “Loved!” reveals the interrelationship between loss and desire as the fundamental ground of memory. The bird desires a lost object, and the loss of the object issues in the bird’s desire – from this irresolvable tension memory attempts to recreate the past in the present. Strikingly, while the bird’s song directly embodies this movement of memory through the circuits of loss-desire, the poet’s attempt to remember the bird’s song and re-create it in the present of the poem indirectly communicates such a movement of memory – in this regard, the poet’s skillful use of onomatopoeia serves not only as a poetic technique but also as a metaphor for an act of memory that seeks in essence to imitate the past and thereby re-call it in the present. Readers thus experience the act of memory in both the content and the process of the poem.

The act of remembering appears successful for the poet, who again becomes exultingly inseparable from the boyhood self who directly witnessed the bird’s memorial “aria”:The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying.
The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting,
The aria’s meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,
The strange tears down the cheeks coursing,
The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,
The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,
To the boy’s soul’s questions sullenly timing, some drown’d secret hissing,
To the outsetting bard.

In his ability in and through language to articulate the stirring of memory, or, better put, in his ability to singmemory, the poet discovers a sense of poetic vocation: “Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake… A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die” (392). The ancient connection between poetry, particularly oral poetry, and memory – Mnemosyne is, after all, the mother of the Muses – is remembered by the poetic voice in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”

In the latter stages of the poem, the sea, implicit throughout the poem as its guiding image, as indeed the “cradle endlessly rocking,” emerges explicitly as a complex trope that manages to locate within the same poetic image both the workings of memory and the work of poetic craft. The sea is both memory poeticized and poetry remembered. Mimetic of the mockingbird’s direct address to the past as the locus of loss and desire, the poet addresses the sea as the ineffable reality in which the interrelated mysteries of both poetry and memory resound:O give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)
O if I am to have so much, let me have more!
…Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?
Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands? (393)
The sea responds with the “delicious word death,” expressing it using epizeuxis – which inevitably ties the sea’s “Death” to the bird’s “Loved!”:Death, death, death, death, death. (393)

The poet directly connects – or fuses, as he puts it – the bird’s song with the sea’s delicious utterance, as well as with his “own songs awaked from that hour” (393). Love and death, loss and desire are the prima materia of both memory and poetry, and the sea is their imagistic “place” – a paradoxical place out of which memory and language attempt to satisfy a never-to-be-satisfied desire, whose hidden face is loss. Yet only the poet can fuse all of these realities into one delicious word, Death, a word whispered by the sea. The poetic voice in “Out of the Cradle” finally exults in the ability of poetry to name, to absorb and to translate both the workings of human memory and indeed its own workings. Where memory ends and poetry begins, however, remains an open question. Hints and indirections are no doubt whispered, now and then, by that Whitmanian trope of tropes: the sea.


1 As Roy Harvey Pearce persuasively argues, the later Whitman seeks rather unsuccessfully to transform his poetry from “archetypal autobiography” into literal prophesy. See Pearce’s “Whitman Justified: The Poet in 1860,” as reprinted in Walt Whitman: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom.


Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. Walt Whitman: Modern Critical Views. NY: Chelsea House, 1985.

Hillman, James. “Image-Sense.” In Working with Images: The Theoretical Base of
Archetypal Psychology, ed. Benjamin Sells. Connecticut: Spring Publications, 2000.

Hirsch, Edward. How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. NY: Harvest, 1999.

Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. Library of America Edition, 1996.