May—the late springtime that marks the divide between childhood and
adolescence—to examine the wonder-¤lled world around him. (As it
does in “The Sleepers,” the amniotic imagery suggests that the entire
poem takes place in a world of fantasy or dreams.)
The emotions of the “outsetting bard” are awakened by the lush and
rhythmic song of the nesting he-bird. The wonder child (or the reminisc-
ing middle-aged persona into whom he has developed) translates the
song that the bird sings to his mate into a carol of joyous love and, later,
translates the song the bird sings after the disappearance of his mate into
a carol of “unsatis¤ed love” that reverberates with grief and lamentation.^11
The poem thus builds upon a venerable literary tradition. From the an-
cient Greeks to Whitman’s contemporaries, poets treated birdsong as
the encoded voice of nature to whose meanings the poet alone is privy.
In the 1880s, an English reviewer observed that “Shelley’s skylark pours
forth harmonious madness of joy, Keats’s nightingale seems to be intoxi-
cated with passionate yearning, but never before has a bird poured forth
to a poet a song so capable of stirring the depths of emotions in the heart,
so heart-breaking indeed in its intensity of grief, as that of the lone
singer ‘on the prong of a moss-scalloped stake, down among the slap-
ping waves.’”^12 The persona recalls (or imagines) that even as a child he
had identi¤ed his own latent song with the song issuing from the bird’s
“trembling throat,” for he addresses the bird as a “demon, singing by
yourself—projecting me.” In later editions he speaks of “demon or bird.”
For the bird is his inspirational “demon”—the voice of nature sent to
awaken his poetic powers. As Padraic Colum pointed out, “Whitman
surely was aware when he gave that strange name to the bird that the de-
mon in tradition is the spiritual power beyond our own soul that prompts
to extraordinary manifestations.”^13 And it is in reference to this “de-
monic” power that the boy-persona addresses the bird:
Bird! (then said the boy’s Soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it mostly to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping,
Now that 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.134 / “So Long!”