Analysis of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” by Walt Whitman

I wrote this five years ago. I was just writing a paper, and thought it was amusing to explore. Now I realize it was incredibly insightful, and makes the paper a proof of itself, which is fascinating to me.

Samuel Owens

Survey of American Literature

Professor McDaniels

03/03/13

Analysis of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” by Walt  Whitman

            The title of the poem begins with an apparent reference to eternal childhood.  It harkens back to William Wordsworth's reference of nature.  William Wordsworth gave the interpretation of the earliest childhood experience as the unconscious experience of nature through animalistic sensations.  This allows for how the poet is able to understand the language of nature without explaining how the language came to him.  Nature with a capital “N” brings its power to the author, and the universal mind makes its power known through song.  The subject of the poem centers on death and sex, which are very Wordsworthian topics.  The cradle endlessly rocking is nature itself, as all things that the poet was aware of that has been giving birth to all life is the earth itself.  Not once in his wonder for the great things in Nature is God referred to, except the wondrous things in nature itself as reflected in its two constants of sex, birth, and death.  Moores writes “This alternative way of knowing entails the merging of self and other, a living cosmos endowed with consciousness, a monistic ontology, love as a higher alternative to normal rational awareness, the privileging of sound and silence over traditional linguistic utterance, a poetics of prophecy, and an anti-religion (Moores, 1).”

            The first three lines uses the same word for emphasis three times, and they seem to signify the three stages of birth, life, and death.  I already illustrated the significance for the opening title, and the second talks about the life-song of the mocking bird.  The mocking bird is an imitation bird, and the significance of the imitation song suggests that it is not real.  The third line breezes over the second line, suggesting that the story of the imitation life-song is insignificant compared to what is universal and real to all people; which is life and death.  He writes “Out of the Ninth-month midnight.” (Whitman, 72) The cradle endlessly rocking is the first link to birth, and although there is no other reason to capitalize the word “Ninth”, he does.  This suggests that there is some significance to the gesture, and linking it to nature would directly connect it to Wordsworth, thus one may reasonably infer that this also refers to “Nature” with a capital “N.”  The line also links birth with death, as midnight is the gateway between the end of one day, and the beginning of another.  It then employs eight uses of the word “from” and then descends into another Wordsworthian usage of imagery of early maturity as an awareness of nature in reminiscence reengaging nature again.  This could be also a direct reference to the poem “Nutting” which both seek to use the poems to showcase the birthplace of themselves as an artist.

            The transcendent nature of love is shown by the cries of the mocking birds.  Although transcendent, the level of maturity of the bird is that of a child, that level that experiences nature unconsciously, that also reflects the maturity level of the child-narrator.  This is why the narrator calls him brother.  Just as in Wordsworth's “We are Seven” we see that the bird is unable to process the loss of his mate, as exemplified in the following lines; “Loud! loud! Loud!/ Loud I call to you, my love!/ High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves,/ Surely you must know who is here, is here,/ You must know who I am, my love./Low-hanging moon!/ What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?/ O it is the shape, the shape of my mate.”(Whitman, 74)  It is a beautifully moving portrait of love that through its inability to process the awareness of nature as exemplified by death, the bird seeks to transcend death through the sheer longing of love for its mate.  In the first few lines I spoke of how the cry of the mockingbird is minimized, it is made clear that as the child-narrator becomes more in tune with the wonders of Nature all around him, it then minimizes the experience of the bird. 

            “For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping,/ now 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 echos have started to life/ within me, never to die.”(Whitman, 75)  This exemplifies further the birth of an artist, and the finding of immortality through the poet's artwork.

Death is what is whispered from the sea into the artists consciousness.  This reflects the birth of early maturity, as it becomes clear that the poet will express his birth and renewed life ironically with his new awareness of death.  This gives the poet transcendental force above the problems of an animals inability to comprehend death.  Death is superior to all, as the poet himself said that he is the one who has the “final word above all.”  His words regarding death's song are as follows, “Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly/ before daybreak,/ Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death,/ And again death, death, death, death/ Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my/ arous'd child's heart,/ But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet, Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving/ me softly all over,/ Death, death, death, death, death./ Which I do not forget.”(Whitman, 76)  It is clear that death is the power that even has the last word on love on several occasions, but by understanding the songs of all nature, it may possess victory over death through the love as embodied by Nature.

            From this analysis it is clear that Whitman was a romantic who was heavily influenced by Wordsworth.  Death, love, and birth are the themes that are common throughout both works.  This is a birth of the poetic process, just as “Nutting” is in Wordsworth's poem exemplified in the fact that both show a loss of innocence through experience with the resulting birth of the poet himself through an understanding of the journey of nature.  Just as in “We are Seven” there is a childish non-comprehension  of death as regarded by the more mature eyes of the budding artist.  Nature is the power throughout this poem, and once again the capitalizing of “Ninth” is a direct nod to Wordsworth himself.  Therefore, one may conclude that this poem is an homage to the poet Wordsworth, as Whitman seems very conscious of what he owes the poet for the birth of his own poetry.

Works Cited

Whitman, Walt. Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.  The Norton Anthology of American Literature,

            vol. C. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011. Print.

Moores, D.J..  Mystical Discourse in Wordsworth and Whitman: a Transatlantic Bridge. Leuven

            Belgium: Peeters Publishers, 2006. Print.

           

Psychological Analysis of "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allen Poe

Samuel Owens

Dr. McDaniels

Senior Seminar

March 23rd, 2014

Psychological Analysis of the Black Cat

            Edgar Allan Poe had an obvious fascination for the perverse side of the human psyche.  It is the realm that troubles us the most, since our society imposes strictures that urges us to repress our darker side which yearns for destruction, while attempting to convince ourselves that we are uniquely good.  We are told it is the world that is evil and selfish, and that we should guard against allowing the evil into our hearts.  Yet Poe shows us that the evil exists within us all, and we protect it through well fortified walls of rationalized denial against what is real within ourselves, as well as our relation to the real world around us.  He does this by using a good natural quality of empathy that allows us to assume a first person understanding of the madness within ourselves, and thus a good understanding of the madness within us all by highlighting various defense mechanisms that is a clever usage of dramatic irony; we are clued into his uses of projection, denial, self-fulfilling prophecy and the like, but he is not.  All of this would highlight the subservience of reason to unconscious drives that seem to conflict to any rational will, and would not reflect our autonomy to unconscious drives.

            Last week Karl Rove made an ass of himself when he very publicly succumbed to denial of Mitt Romney's loss of the election, and so we are taken to the narrator who introduces us with that basic concept by stating “mad am I not-...” (Poe pg. 697).  Even when he is facing the gallows, it is not that he is about to die that would trouble him, but rather that he should have to face the fact that he is a little mad.  It speaks to a common flaw; we are more likely to accept negative outward circumstances than admit to a personal failing. In describing his descent into killing he appears to suffer from a dissociative personality disorder that allows him to avoid feeling personally responsible for his descent into madness.  He seems to give the personality a name via a capitalized descriptor of “the Fiend Intemperance”(Poe pg. 696).  He then goes on to proclaim that he was possessed by a “demon”, and attempts to rationalize his responsibility for what he terms as a horrific crime.

            God is noticeably absent from this text, but there is a mention of the god of the underworld by naming the cat “Pluto”.  God is love, and his character as a young person personifies love; therefore, it could be argued that by abandoning himself he abandons God.  Satan in the book of Job is seen as God's servant.  When he kills the cat, it could be argued that he incurred the wrath of God as administered by his servant the devil seen as the flames that burned all of his worldly wealth.  The reference of the wife to the cat as a witch also infers the devil because witches were thought to have familiars such as cats who assisted them in their work with their pact with the devil.  By associating theological thoughts in a mad mind, then it would not be a far leap to the conclusion that the author is associating theological understanding with madness.  The story also mocks redemption with the return of a cat that would give vengeance to the offending narrator.  He is already damned when he is driven mad, as he proclaims that he is “even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.” (Poe pg. 697)  God is shown to be the main product of delusion as exemplified in the narrator, and perhaps his most perverse portion regarding his state of mind.

            Alcohol is what the narrator blames for his increasing rudeness and disregard for others, but it is his guilt which aims to rob him of his reason.  When he first kills the cat and the fire ensues the cat winds up back in his room noose and all.  This plagues his guilt that consumed him from the moment he does the deed as a sign of vengeance beyond the grave; however, he then regains his reason and deduces that someone must have seen the fire from the garden and thrown the cat into his room in order to wake him up.  It is from this sense that we observe that his calculating skills have not necessarily been deprived.  We see in Poe that he loses his capacity for empathy, love, compassion, and good manners but that he does not lose his ability to think logically.  When he is acquainted with a new black cat, we see his guilt further consume him.  The tuft of white hair on his chest slowly grows into a noose.  He is set into madness as he fancies that the cat intends to send him to the gallows for what he had done.  One day the cat almost tripped him, and he attempted to kill it with an ax.  Unfortunately, his wife stopped him, and he then aimed his rage at her instead.  He finds no fault however, in his reasoning his way to avoid responsibility from the police with the way he hides the body.  This further illustrates that his reasoning was only a method to escape responsibility, or otherwise ease his guilty conscience.  In no way was reasoning not aimed to enable his madness, rather than reason against it.  Even when he appears to accept what he did is wrong, it only serves to appear to attempt to convince the reader, and therefore himself, that he is indeed sane.

            Projection is obviously one of the purveying themes throughout the story.  He projects his own guilt, and own shortcomings onto the cat, and unfortunately his wife.  By labeling the cat as a vengeful spirit from beyond the grave, he is able to project his guilt onto an outside source.  When he attempts to kill his cat, and then his wife, he projects the blame that the guilt calls for onto something on the outside.  He labels himself as loving and kind, but projects his own problem onto some outward fiend, or alcohol.  Supernatural sources also conspire against him.  In one instance, it is God who cannot forgive him.  At another point, it was “Pluto” or rather the devil that would come to bring vengeance upon him.  This is directly in line with what psychologists differentiate between an internal locus of control, and an external locus of control.  An internal locus of control plays more to a non-theistic line of thought in that our present circumstances our in our locus of control contra religious reasoning that everything is in God's hands and that we are all passive players in His plan.  Poe could be arguing that belief in God leads to a thought involving an external locus of control, and would unleash the horrors within the human psyche by denying personal responsibility.

                        The mystery of all of the rationalizations and excuses along the way do leave open one question: how do we account for his apparently motiveless murder of his wife and cat.  It is not sufficient to say that it is simply because he was an alcoholic.  I'm sure that many of us can name several alcoholics who never stooped to murder their pets or spouses.  In all, there was a debate between “'a resurgent evangelicalism and conservative Natural Theology' but increasingly challenged by 'a positivist science that was to have its nineteenth century culmination in Charles Darwin's Origin of Species' (Stark pg. 255).”  With this understanding it seems clear that Poe inserts himself directly into the middle of a debate and thus asserts that they are both wrong.  God is not the cause of all good and evil, and our reason can not necessarily conquer our problems.  In this story we seem to get from Poe a rejection of all fairy tales.  This gives testament to Poe's genius.  We are only naturally going to assume that when there is a heated argument between two opposing view-points that one side must be right and the other is wrong.  Perhaps Poe's point is that when that assumption slips into our consciousness is the very moment that critical thinking also stops.

            Throughout the tale there are many instances of several attempts at self-deception, and self delusion.  All of these were defense mechanisms aimed at avoiding seeing the evil that is us, and not necessarily just something that happens to us.  This inability to own up to our own evil allows the evil to own us, and we would fall prey to demons on the rationalization side and theological side.  Their unbridled faith in God or reason is what allows men to stop taking responsibility for them and allows them to be slaves to their impulses.  Another point is that God gave man dominion over the animals, and his cruelty of his animals could be taken as a perverse way to see God's dominion of the animals through his agents in humanity.  Neither side of the debate has it right, nor no matter who wins, does Poe seem to have a cynical outlook that evil will always prevail in the hearts of man, no matter which side of the debate is “winning”.

Works Cited

Poe, Edgar Allen. The Norton Anthology American Literature 1820-1865. “The Black Cat.”

            W.W. Norton and Company Inc.: New York, NY, 2012. Print.

Stark, Joseph. “Motive and Meaning: The Mystery of the Will in Poe's ‘The Black Cat’.” The     

            Mississippi Quarterly 57.2 (2004): 255. Print.