The adult persona appears to relive the child’s mysterious initiation as all
“through the night” of his dreams and memories he hears the sea “hiss-
ing” and “lisping” the word death. Nevertheless, the sea’s answer remains
shrouded in vagueness, since it can be understood as either terrifying or
comforting. The sea’s language, it has been suggested, was never meant
to be intelligible speech in the ¤rst place, but rather nature’s ur-speech
or the pre-language with which nature communes with transcendental
minds like that of the nascent poet-persona.^17 As such it remains open to
a broad range of interpretations and conjectures.
The 1860 version of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” illustrates
the persona’s recurrent doubts concerning his ability to understand death.
As Richard Chase observes, the poem “begins with the sense that all life
is a mode of death, and ®owers with the perception that all imagination
is a mode of our sense of death.” Hence, Chase reasons, there can be only
one answer to the demands of the boy’s soul for a “clue” to life and inspi-
ration.^18 The poem’s argument does indeed appear to be circular, since for
Whitman death pervades everything. Readers of the poem’s ¤nal ver-
sion may reasonably conclude that by “absorbing” the bird’s song and the
sea’s whispered word the boy-persona has been initiated—and through
him the poet-persona is perpetually being initiated—into death’s mystery.
“My own songs awakened from that hour,” declares the persona retro-
spectively of the moment of cosmic enlightenment when the sea seem-
ingly repeated “the low and delicious word death” and launched his ca-
reer as a singer of “clearer, louder, more sorrowful” songs. David Kuebrich
interprets the word from the sea as an indirect communiqué from God
or Heaven, so that the sea’s mystic word can be read as a con¤rmation of
the persona’s faith that death implies an afterlife of the soul.^19 Still, we
can only wonder whether the enchanted boy—or the cosmos-poet, for
that matter—ever fully comprehends what the sea means by its runic
whispers of the word death. If the poet, or the poet-persona, knows he
withholds the secret from the reader.^20 The repeated “word out of the sea”
remains only a faint clue that the mature bard (at least in the poem’s ¤nal
version) chooses to interpret as an invitation to probe ever deeper into the
mystery of death. Stephen A. Black explains that the reiterated word
death that the man-child seems to hear all through the night “takes on
some of the quality of what psychoanalysts call ‘magic words,’ words that
give their speaker a sense of omnipotence and the illusion that he controls
the thing named.”^21 So that even if the “word out of the sea” remains
cryptic and ultimately indecipherable, the persona can still ¤nd comfort
138 / “So Long!”