Once again Whitman overlays time frames so that the magic moment of
the man-child’s awakening coincides with the moment when the adult
poet-persona is inspired to write this poem of love and death. He inter-
prets the mockingbird’s songs of love and mourning, “the meanings of
which I, of all men, know” and “have treasured every note,” as nature’s
sanction to write poems of love and loss. Nevertheless, the wonder child
(or the man he becomes) realizes that the bird’s song can furnish only a
part of the lesson that he must learn if he is to “utter” great poems of life
and death. The child-persona becomes aware that if he is to become a
poet whose words encompass death and immortality, nature has yet to
grant him the “the word ¤nal—superior to all.” The poem’s original title,
“A Word out of the Sea,” highlights the fact that not until the man-child
receives that longed-for “word out of the sea,” seemingly spoken to him
alone by the sea-mother, can he be initiated into the mysteries that will
enable him to become the vatic poet whose music resonates with the
mysteries of life and death. And the mature Whitman, contrasting his
own work to that of his contemporary versi¤ers who wrote “tearful harp
or glib piano” tunes about life’s super¤cies, did indeed consider himself to
be such a cosmic poet.^14 The bird’s lament seemingly imparts the myster-
ies of love and grief to the Long Island wonder child. But before he
becomes eligible to evolve into America’s master poet, he has to be initi-
ated into the knowledge of death. As he stands at the sea’s brink be-
neath a “yellow and sagging moon” that seemingly sympathizes with “the
sweet hell” within his bosom, he feels a frustrated awareness that some-
thing is lacking to complete his knowledge, an “unknown want” that
will reveal “the destiny of me.” He is eager to feel the erotic thrill and
the joyous terror of the forbidden world of death. Hence he cries out to
the sea,
O give me some clew!
O if I am to have so much, let me have more!Time and space become con®ated at this moment, for “the dusky demon
aroused” in the youth’s imagination on the Long Island shore has yet to
reveal the “clew” that still “lurks in the night here somewhere.” (That last
phrase—emphasis added—occurs in the 1881 edition, when “demon” was
changed to the more obvious “messenger.”) The locus of the here is not
a de¤ned point, since it may allude to the mature poet’s never-ending
struggle to interpret the sea’s “lurking” clue and the still impenetrable
“So Long!” / 135