Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

E68906

lyric poem poem

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking is a lyric poem by Walt Whitman that meditates on memory, loss, and the awakening of the poetic self through a boy’s encounter with a mourning bird by the sea.

Statements (48)

Predicate	Object
instanceOf	lyric poem → poem →
author	Walt Whitman →
centralEvent	boy’s encounter with a mourning bird →
centralImage	mourning bird →
collection	Leaves of Grass →
countryOfOrigin	United States →
criticalReputation	major lyric of Leaves of Grass →
editionInLeavesOfGrass	1860 edition →
firstPublicationYear	1859 →
firstPublishedIn	The Atlantic Monthly →
form	free verse →
genre	elegy → lyric →
hasInfluenceOn	modern American poetry →
language	English →
laterTitle	Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking →
literaryMovement	American Romanticism → Transcendentalism (influenced) →
meter	irregular →
motif	birdsong → sea → translation of nature’s voice →
narrativePerspective	first person →
narrator	adult poet recalling childhood →
originalTitle	A Child’s Reminiscence →
partOf	Whitman’s sea-drift poems →
protagonist	a boy by the sea →
relatedWorkByAuthor	Song of Myself → When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d →
setting	Long Island shore → seashore →
structure	alternation of narrator and bird’s song →
stylisticFeature	cataloguing → musical phrasing → parallelism → repetition →
subjectMatter	boy’s initiation into awareness of death → origin of the poet’s voice →
symbol	bird as poet → cradle as sea → sea as origin of life and song →
theme	awakening of the poetic self → childhood and maturity → death → loss → memory → nature as teacher →

Referenced by (5)

Subject (surface form when different)	Predicate
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking →	laterTitle
Leaves of Grass →	notablePoem
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry →	relatedWorkByAuthor
There Was a Child Went Forth →	sharesThemeWith
Walt Whitman →	wrote