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Teaching Whitman's "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking"

5/8/2014

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Like a true hipster, Whitman was rocking the beard "before it was cool."
I just wrapped up the semester, indeed the year, with this hauntingly beautiful poem by Walt Whitman. It was a poignant note to end the semester, but my students really engaged with the text and I think they enjoyed our discussion very much.

To my mind, the crucial part of the poem is condensed in the following lines:
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.
My basic strategy for opening this poem up to my students is to try to get them to see the discussion (the "colloquy") that's happening between the "trio" named in these lines. Once we get to that point, discussion unfolds powerfully. 

The primary meaning of the trio is the bird, the speaker, and the sea, but there are many ways to develop and expand that reading. 

I don't jump right into that though; rather, I start at the beginning of the poem with that first stanza, filled with so many prepositional phrases strung together that it's easy to miss that it is in fact a single sentence.
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 wander'd alone, bareheaded, barefoot,
Down from the shower'd 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-arous'd 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.
My first question is simply: what are the subject, verb, and object of this sentence? My students seemed awestruck and delighted to think that this entire stanza was one sentence--and not even a run-on!--but perhaps they are a little unusual. I don't know if most students get excited about grammar.  Regardless, this is a sneaky way to slip in some instruction on the parts of speech.  We eliminate all the prepositional phrases and they eventually boil down the grammar to the simple syntax: I sing a reminiscence.

We use this discovery then to think about how important memory is in this poem, and what it would mean for the speaker to go back to being a little boy again as he claims to do. Where in time are we to locate the speaking voice of this poem? What kind of temporality are we talking about?
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Two feather'd guests from Alabama, two together,
And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,
And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,
And every day the she-bird crouch'd on her nest, silent, with bright eyes,
And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing
them,
Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.
Students are quick to pick up on this stanza as a touchstone for what will unfold; they note that the anaphora of the lines links the she-bird, the he-bird, and the boy into one little family unit. The boy becomes something of an animal behaviorist, so he is now qualified to "translate" the mockingbird's song into English for us. He translates both songs of joy (before the she-bird's death) and songs of faltering hope (after the she-bird's death). It's worth it to have students read the long, italicized song of the mockingbird's mourning out loud so that they can hear the repetitions, especially the variations on the word "love."

We then compare that song to the song mentioned at the end of the poem, when the speaker asks for as a "word final, superior to all."
Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,
Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death,
And again death, death, death, death
Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's heart,
But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,
Death, death, death, death, death.
This is when they start to piece together that "the savage old mother" and the "old crone rocking the cradle" are in fact the sea, and that this repetition of "death, death, death, death, death" comes from the crashing of the waves on the shore.

From here everything falls into place, and we can expand our discussion more meaningfully. We compare the song of the bird to the song of the sea, and then we expand to consider the song of the speaker.

We also return to the concept of time. What does it mean that the sea is associated with both birth (the cradle) and death, and how is the bird counterpoised against that? Are the bird and the sea opposites, with one representing a heroic refusal to give up on life and hope and the other offering a seductive call to surrender to destiny or to death? Are the bird and the sea two sides of the same coin, since both are associated with life and with death?

And, finally, how does the speaker fit into all of this?
Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, now I have heard you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder
      and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.

O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what
      there in the night,
By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arous'd, the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.
I love asking my students to try to identity why the speaker calls the bird a demon, especially since the bird is associated so strongly with selfless, perfect love and with courageous hope in the face of despair. Those are qualities we might expect to be associated with angels rather than with demons.

It is somewhere around this point that students start to see that the speaker is complaining that the mourning bird's aria has awakened him out of the blissful peace of his childhood and that he will never be the same again. The poem comes to us in the voice of an adult man, who looks back at the moment of his childhood when he suddenly started to understand the concepts of love and loss, the moment when he could first project forward in time to his own eventual suffering and death. The death of the she-bird can, therefore, serve as a symbol for the death of his own childlike ignorance.


I think it worthwhile to point out to the students how much the speaker is like the "demon" bird in that he awakens in his auditors an understanding of both goodness and suffering.  If he is the "bird," we are now the boy.  Life may be more complicated for the speaker after his encounter with the bird, but it's not all "death,
death, death, death, death." Despite the poignancy and mournfulness of the poem, the child grows up and gains his own poetic voice.  I end by telling my students that I hope that they too will fly off from the course a little bit older and whole lot wiser.
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Teaching Whitman's Song of Myself

5/1/2014

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Whitman, contemplating his glorious beard
Whitman and Dickinson are often paired together as major poets of mid-nineteenth century America. I find Whitman to be far harder to teach than Dickinson, partly because Dickinson's poetry is so self-evidently poetry. Whitman's poetry seems somehow harder to dig into. I feel like I finally cracked open the nut this go-round, and I wanted to share the fruits of my labor with you all.

I only teach the first fifteen stanzas of "Song of Myself," but that's more than enough for two, full hours of conversation.

I ease into Whitman through Emerson, following the footsteps of my predecessor at the OHS, Adam Rzepka. After leaving the OHS, Dr. Rzepka became an assistant professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. I had the great pleasure of meeting him at the most recent SAA in St. Louis. What a treat to make friends with someone from whom I have learned so much!

So some key passages in Emerson to share in a discussion of Whitman would be from the essays "Nature" (which lays out the intellectual framework for the Transcendentalist movement) and "The Poet" (which calls for a great poet to become the voice of a new American poetry). Emerson similarly influenced Thoreau, so thinking about how Whitman and Thoreau each take something different from Emerson is a productive way into all three authors.

From "Nature"

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars...

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are always inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort all her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected all the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.
In this passage from "Nature," we can see so many of Emerson's influences on Thoreau: the love of solitude, the sense of a microcosm reaching out and extending into a macrocosm, the belief that some sort of transcendent truth becomes available to use through our communion with the natural world. Obviously Whitman picks up on some of these (especially the micro/macrocosm) but others are less important to him than they are to Thoreau. This is a good opening point to try to point students to: whereas Thoreau follows Emerson in emphasizing man's communion with Nature, Whitman's sense of communion is profoundly social.

From "The Poet"
Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.
I think that this passage is so lovely for showing what Whitman learns from Emerson and what he brushes aside. The idea in the last sentence--that there is no inopportune or ignoble occasion for poetry--is apparent in every sentence of those opening fifteen stanzas of "Song of Myself." But his attention is less on the snow or the water or the twilight because he's so fascinated with the diverse people who respond to those natural elements.

I ask students to read Whitman as eschewing or disregarding what others might think of as inopportune or ignoble, and I propose that he does so by dissolving boundaries and expectations. We discuss boundaries that are so common that we almost expect to see them, as if they are "natural" ways of dividing up the world into discrete categories, often paired as binaries:
  • Self and other
  • Types of others, either through race, class, or profession
  • Civilization and nature
  • Man and woman
  • Young and old
  • Geographical difference
  • Historical difference
  • Human and animal
  • Dead and alive

Then we look for how Whitman treats these supposedly natural binaries or hierarchies.  In every instance, I ask my students what is his tone here? With the exception of the slave holder, Whitman embraces every possible facet of American life in these poems. They are often amazed at his absolute renunciation of shame.

Particularly productive stanzas are stanzas 1 (self and other), 6 (living and dead), 10 (geographical, racial, and historical difference), 11 (men and women), 13-4 (animals and human), and 15 (class and professional differences).

Another productive in-road has been to ask students to imagine this as an extended documentary of American life, with a series of vignettes about exemplary characters. I ask them how they imagine a scene in a stanza: if there were actors or actress playing the parts of farmers, butchers, prostitutes, lonely old maids, mothers, etc., then which actor would they cast to play a given part and why? If you were directing the vignette for this stanza, where would you set it (a generic city? Ohio? Maine? Boston?) and why? If you were directing the vignette, then where would the camera linger and why? Does it matter that sometimes this "gaze" is male and sometime it's female?
All of this is an attempt to get them to think about what it would mean for Whitman's speaker to "assume" everything to himself:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
The discussion concludes with the questions: What makes this poem American? Why did Whitman respond this way to Emerson’s call for a great bard to speak an American voice?
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    Claire Dawkins

    English Instructor at Stanford's Online High School

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