In "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," Walt Whitman uses the image of death to represent the transition from childhood innocence and individualism to emotional maturity and universalism. The young boy listens to the sad song of a bird calling for his female mate who never returns. In the midst of the bird's great anguish, the boy demands to know from nature "A word...superior to all," and nature replies in swirls in the sea, "the low and delicious word DEATH; and again Death-ever Death, Death, Death" (Whitman 1). This analysis will explore the meaning of this image provided by Whitman in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking."
The young boy is moved to tears by the pain an anguish of a male bird whose plaintive calls for his mate go unreturned. The boy experiences emotional development in his relationship with the bird and, ultimately, nature. The boy must come to confront death before he can become emotionally mature as an adult. When he confronts death or loss the boy is able to go beyond thinking of himself or the individual. He begins to learn that even if his thoughts are deep or distinct in the moment, he and his thoughts are only an insignificant part of the universe. In this sense, the boy develops emotional maturity from his consideration of loss and death. As Whitman (4-5) writes of the boy informing the bird,
O you singer, solitary, singing by yourself-projecting me;
O solitary me, listening-nevermore shall I cease perpetuating you;
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there, in the night,
By the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arous'd-the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.
The boy has been transformed by his ...