mystery of death.^15 Hence the poet conjures up the scene in which his
youthful self stands by the seashore and beseeches the “old crone,” the
amniotic ocean of life, the sea goddess of creation and destruction, to give
him the ultimate word, the “word, ¤nal, superior to all,” that he hopes
will unlock the mysteries. And, miraculously, that word is seemingly
vouchsafed to him as the sea whispers “the low and delicious word death
/ And again Death—ever Death, Death, Death.”
The boy-persona has imagined that he hears the sea intone the cryp-
tic word death, thus seemingly granting him—and the poet—the clue to
the most profound of nature’s mysteries. But an important passage in
the 1859–1860 version of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” which
was later deleted, differs signi¤cantly from the poem’s ¤nal revision by
clearly articulating the persona’s inability to construe the sea’s “message.”
Haunted by the fear that what he has seen and heard may be only an
illusion, and doubtful that he has made contact with the true voice of
nature or that he has comprehended the sea’s runic message—if, indeed,
there ever was such a message—he implores the sea to grant him a fur-
ther clue to what he has supposedly seen and heard:
O a word! O what is my destination?
O I fear it is henceforth chaos!
O how joys, dreads, convolutions, human shapes, and all shapes,
spring as from graves around me!
O phantoms! you cover all the land, and all the sea!
O I cannot see in the dimness whether you smile or frown
upon me;
O vapor, a look, a word! O well-beloved!
O you dear women’s and men’s phantoms!^16These excluded lines may re®ect Whitman’s depressed mood in the late
1850s. If so, they imply that the mature poet-persona still fears that such
clues as the “message out of sea” may be only deceptive “phantom” clues
to the mystery of existence. At this juncture the beleaguered persona ap-
peals to the “dear women’s and men’s phantoms,” the shapes in the dim-
ness that “spring as from graves around me.” If the “phantoms” are not
mere illusions, could they possibly be the vision of spirit messengers of
the dead vainly trying to impart the secrets of the grave and the meaning
of death to this “outsetting bard”? In this context, the lines that follow (in
136 / “So Long!”