Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking and Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman - Essay Example

– I was about 30 minutes late with this order making sure the referencing was correct. If this hasn’t severely upset your schedule, I would greatly appreciate it if you could hit the extension button on your order page to extend the original deadline so I am not penalized for the small overage. Student name Instructor name Course name Date Walt Whitman’s Poetry In his poetry and other writings, Walt Whitman engages his reader primarily through his flair for description. He makes the bold claim that poetry provides the soul with the means of transcending the boundaries of the common world and asserts that America needs to develop its own literary corpus. In making this assertion, he claims that America is unique on earth in its greatness, vastness and focus on the common people. “Other states indicate themselves in their deputies … but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors … but always more in the common people” (Whitman, 1999: 3). For Whitman, the origin of his poems is found within his life and within the everyday environments in which he finds himself. He takes a transcendental approach to life as he relates his common experiences to the connecting forces of love as a means of transcending the self and coming to an understanding that concepts of death and life are one as can be seen through a comparison of his poems “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “Song of the Open Road.” Both of these poem are concerned with the imagery and events that might occur in everyday life. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” tells the story of Whitman as a young boy playing by the edge of the sea. Every day he went to watch a pair of nesting mockingbirds, fascinated by the way they work together to care for their eggs. But then one day the female mockingbird leaves the next and doesn’t return, leaving the male bird to sing for her using his own unique song. It is in this song of longing love and need that Whitman finds a transcendent connection to the bird and, by extension, the rest of nature: “Now in a moment I know what I am for – I awake / And already a thousand songs, clearer, louder, more sorrowful than yours, / A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me never to die” (Whitman, 1992: 114-115). Having awoken to life at last, the young boy realizes there’s another voice, a deeper voice, one that permeates everything at all times. He finds this voice in the sound of the sea as it whispers at his feet the name of death. In the end, the boy discovers that it is the promise of death, unrelenting and ever-present, that enables him to fully experience living in all of its connections with the natural world around him. This same progression of thought can be found in his poem “Song of the Open Road.” Although the speaker is a little older, now presumably having finished college as he is in the process of dropping his school books and lessons in order to discover what awaits him on the open road, he experiences much the same sort of progression. He again starts from a point in which he is merely mingling with the common scenes of everyday life, “the black man with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas’d, the illiterate person … the hasting after the physician, the beggar’s tramp, the drunkard’s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics / the escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple / the early market man, the hearse” (Whitman, 1990: 121). In depicting all of these various individuals, though, he illustrates how they are all connected in their acceptability to the rules of the road, which will accept all without judgment or rejection. As he discovers his transcendent connection with these other people who use the road, he discovers a new sense of love that connects them all in the same sense that there was love connecting the two birds from his childhood: “There are divine things well envelop’d / I swear to you there are diving things more beautiful than words can tell” (Whitman, 1990: 125). He expresses highly transcendent ideas in his instructions about how to take the best of the farmer’s fields, the orchard’s fruits, the city’s treasures, without ever having spent a dime or deprived anyone of their own sense of worth in the form of a memory that cannot be taken back or removed except by his own will. Yet in this shared love among strangers, he again recognizes the forces of death and departure as the primary motivation for this connection. “All religion, all solid things, arts, governments – all that was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into niches and corners before the procession of souls along the grand roads of the universe” (Whitman, 1990: 127). In other words, all things and connections will die, but the experience of having enjoyed them once lives on in the soul forever. Within these two poems, one can see Whitman attempting to encourage his readers to take a more transcendent view of life. They are coming of age poems as the speaker learns more about himself through his experiences, but they are intended to assist the reader also in coming of age spiritually. Transcendentalists attempt to redefine the world and the human experience in terms of spirituality and interconnectedness with the physical natural world. While the idea of transcendentalism has always remained very fluid as a natural by-product of its primary tenets, individual study of those who lived the life, the most famous of whom today is Henry Thoreau, can provide great insight as to what is meant by the word ‘transcendentalism’. Whitman’s comments regarding the fields and orchards in “Song of the Open Road” are actually very similar to comments made by Thoreau in his own book Walden. As Thoreau discusses the process of buying and then losing ownership of a farm, he illustrates the transcendental approach to the concept of possession. “But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow … I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only” (1993: 68). The ideas of transcendentalism are essentially a combination of “romanticism with reform. It celebrated the individual rather than man. Transcendentalism conceded that there were two ways of knowing, through the senses and through intuition” (Clendenning, 1990). Another one of the common characteristics of the movement is a general attempt to create a better world by refocusing on what it truly means to live. Thus Whitman’s purpose in presenting two lengthy poems that track his course through a process of enlightenment through his deep connection to the world around him can be identified as an attempt to fulfill the tenets of transcendentalism. All of the elements are present including taking inspiration from the environment, shedding the material values of the consumer culture, identifying the truly important elements of life and realizing actual treasure cannot be found in material form. In writing his poetry, Whitman seems to be trying to direct his readers to a closer understanding of themselves and a more satisfying lifetime pursuit than mere gadgets and toys that will break, whither and fade just as many of their relationships will. Instead, he encourages them to enjoy what they have while they have it and thus be able to take warm memories and true treasures in the form of spiritual understanding into the future. Works Cited Clendenning, John. “Thoreau, Henry David.” World Book Encyclopedia. 1990. Whitman, Walt. “Song of the Open Road.” Leaves of Grass. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990: 120-129. Whitman, Walt. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” The Essential Whitman. New York: Galahad Books, 1992: 109-116. Whitman, Walt. Walt Whitman. New York: MacMillan, 1999. Read More