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  • The Rhythm that Rocks Walt’s Cradle
  • W. D. Snodgrass (bio)

WALT Whitman’s most beautiful, most perfectly formed poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” presents us with an essential question about his ever-perplexing life and career: why should Whitman, already famous, indeed notorious, for casting off the formal patterns that so long had shaped the music of English poetry—why should he now devise his own new patterns of rhythmic form? In his earliest poems Whitman had adopted the traditional forms that specify the number and position of strong and weak syllables per line and that also often employ rhyme. As it either fulfills or thwarts our expectations, this pattern of strong versus weak syllables (also usually implying long versus short) shapes an underlying rhythm, the basic current of music then thought essential to lift poems to a higher aesthetic and/or moral level. Sidney Lanier and others correctly identified this as a triple rhythm (3/8 or 3/4), though Lanier himself imposed, or at least implied, uniform time values more appropriate to actual music than to language in which such matters are always flexible and individual.

Whitman touched off his revolt against these conformities in the poem now known as “Song of Myself”—a poem declaring itself to be a new Bible or guidebook for the beliefs and values of the loving all-inclusive society he imagined America might become. These beliefs provoke much of the dazzling imagery and symbolism that electrify this amazing poem. The self it celebrates must explore and expand, passing outward to identify with all existence—an inclusiveness displayed in the poem’s language, form, and subject matter, and shown in verse styles ranging from flat arrhythmic prose all the way to those traditional forms he was supposedly overthrowing. This inclusiveness overrode his deepest doubts and fears: that he was alone, cut off from the lives of others—from the mother, from the lover, from his society’s intentions and expectations.

As most critics note, however, with age and experience Whitman’s private sensualities, desires, and joys lost much of their surprise [End Page 398] and shock, offering fewer and less startling transformations of language. Meantime the world around him had also changed, growing ominously farther from his ideals and hopes—rushing into Civil War with its hatreds, greeds, and prejudices multiplying, its homophobia spreading. Even worse his private journals reveal that the “manly love of comrades” he had so strongly championed had proven, at times, more of a torment than a solution.

Whitman’s later masterpiece, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” deals directly with his fears of isolation and abandonment that his beliefs had veiled and reveals a self emptied of meaning by the loss of love. Death, earlier the great dilemma—both for his doctrines and for the structure of “Song of Myself”—now becomes the one solution that can rejoin him to the great Mother, the Sea. During years of revision and experiment, both poetic and personal (he had once considered becoming an itinerant lecturer and preacher), much of the transformative power of his beliefs had been replaced by an interest in the transcendent power of music. His style was less influenced by homiletic writers such as Martin Tupper in favor of the more musical efforts of such poets as Tennyson. Unfortunately this idiom allowed him to relapse at times into old-fashioned “poetical” language, yet his deepening discovery of internal and personal rhythms finally led him to musics that charged his poems with emotional enrichments unavailable to others or to himself while he depended on traditional verse forms or on conscious visionary structures of belief.

During the mid and the late nineteenth century, many English poets, influenced by folk songs and ballads, had turned from the strict syllable count of classical prosody toward stress verse in which only accented syllables are counted. These stresses, of course, fall more or less equally in time as the main rhythmic accents; lighter syllables fit in as they may. Though this forgoes the subtler syncopations and vitally flexible rhythmic complications many poets had developed in the classical prosody, it does offer simple and more obvious rhythms. Many such folk songs...

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