ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The contents of all the units in this block have been

taken from various open source websites with due
referencing and acknowledgement. The link to those
sites have been mentioned in the “Suggested Readings”
section at the end.
 BACHELOR OF ARTS (HONOURS) IN
ENGLISH (BAEG)

BEG-8
American Literature

Block-2
American Poetry
Unit-1 Walt Whitman: Out of The Cradle Endlessly
Rocking

Unit-2 Robert Frost: “Stopping by The Woods In A

Snowy Evening”

Unit-3 Emily Dickinson: “Because I Could Not Stop For

Death”

Unit-4 Maya Angelou: “I Know Why The Caged Birds

Sing”
UNIT-1 WALT WHITMAN: OUT OF THE CRADLE
ENDLESSLY ROCKING

Structure

1.0 Objectives
1.1 Introduction
1.2 About the poet ‘Walt Whitman’
1.3 Sing The Body Electric
1.4 Come up from the fields Father
1.5 O Captain, My Captain
1.6 Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking: The Text
1.7 Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking: Analysis
1.8 Suggested Readings
1.9 Let us sum up
1.10 Unit end questions

1.0 OBJECTIVES

After going through this unit, the learner will be able to:
 Know about Walt Whitman and his works.
 Critically analyse his works and style of writing.
 Analyse his much anticipated poem ‘Out of the cradle endlessly rocking’.

1.1 INTRODUCTION

No American writer has been more influential, nationally and internationally, than
Walt Whitman. Poets from his time to our own, in the United States and around the
world, have talked back to Whitman, carrying on the conversation that he initiated
over 150 years ago—a dialogue about democracy, poetry, love, death, and the endless
permutations of life that he believed would define America and eventually produce a
republic equal to its ideals.

It is difficult to become a poet in the United States without at some point coming to
grips with Whitman, answering the challenge that he issued to future generations, to
the "Poets to come": "I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,"
he said, "Expecting the main things from you" (LG, 14). This continual deferral of the
ideal was Whitman's style; he set in process a history and a literature that would
struggle toward democracy, even if they would never fully attain it. His poetry was
written to initiate response, revision, process, and his own compositional techniques
emphasized his refusal to reach conclusion. Whitman was the ultimate reviser,
continually reopening his poems and books to endless shuffling, retitling, editing, and
reconceptualising. Leaves of Grass was Whitman's title for a process more than a
1
product: every change in his life and in his nation made him reopen his book to
revision.

Whitman's desire was for a democracy that celebrated the self yet sang the ensemble,
a democracy that worshipped the individual and the communal, that indeed defined
democratic individuality as the ability to imagine and empathize with the vast variety
of other individualities that composed the nation: "One's-Self I sing, a simple separate
person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse" (LG, 1). Whitman's
continual wrestling with the problems and challenges of the emerging American
democracy and the developing American democratic art has had a surprisingly
widespread impact on other countries as well, where his democratic ideas and radical
poetics have taken root and emerged in new hybrids as his work mixes with other
national literatures. There are now many different Walt Whitman’s at work in various
poetic traditions, influencing writers in distinctive ways—in some countries he is the
poet of socialism, in others the poet of spiritualism, in others still the poet of radical
sexuality. His work has been translated into all the major languages of the world, and
in several languages there are multiple and competing translations of Leaves of Grass.
Even in the United States, the variety of reactions to Whitman's poetry is staggering;
American poets have as often rejected him as they have embraced him. The
remarkable fact is that everyone, at some point, has to confront Whitman, wrestle with
his structuring of poetry, the nation, democracy, and the self: "I am large," he said, "I
contain multitudes"

1.2 ABOUT THE POET ‘WALT WHITMAN’

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, on Long Island, New York.
He was the second son of Walter Whitman, a house-builder, and Louisa Van Velsor.
In the 1820s and 1830s, the family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Long
Island and Brooklyn, where Whitman attended the Brooklyn public schools.

At the age of twelve, Whitman began to learn the printer’s trade and fell in love with
the written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with
the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible.

Whitman worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing
district demolished the industry. In 1836, at the age of seventeen, he began his career
as teacher in the one-room schoolhouses of Long Island. He continued to teach until
1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career.

He founded a weekly newspaper, The Long-Islander, and later edited a number of

Brooklyn and New York papers, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In 1848,
Whitman left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become editor of the New
Orleans Crescent for three months. After witnessing the auctions of enslaved
individuals in New Orleans, he returned to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848 and co-founded
a “free soil” newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, which he edited through the next fall.
2
Whitman’s attitudes about race have been described as “unstable and inconsistent.”
He did not always side with the abolitionists, yet he celebrated human dignity.

In Brooklyn, he continued to develop the unique style of poetry that later so astonished
Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition
of Leaves of Grass, which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He
published the volume himself, and sent a copy to Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman
released a second edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-two poems, a letter
from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in response.
During his lifetime, Whitman continued to refine the volume, publishing several more
editions of the book. Noted Whitman scholar, M. Jimmie Killingworth writes that “the
‘merge,' as Whitman conceived it, is the tendency of the individual self to overcome
moral, psychological, and political boundaries. Thematically and poetically, the notion
dominates the three major poems of 1855: ‘I Sing the Body Electric,' ‘The Sleepers,'
and ‘Song of Myself,' all of which were ‘merged’ in the first edition under the single
title Leaves of Grass but were demarcated by clear breaks in the text and the repetition
of the title.”

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a “purged” and “cleansed”
life. He worked as a freelance journalist and visited the wounded at New York City–
area hospitals. He then travelled to Washington, D. C. in December 1862 to care for
his brother, who had been wounded in the war.

Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to

stay and work in the hospitals; he ended up staying in the city for eleven years. He
took a job as a clerk for the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of the
Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered
that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive. After
Harlan fired him, he went on to work in the attorney general's office.

In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. A few months
later he travelled to Camden, New Jersey, to visit his dying mother at his brother’s
house. He ended up staying with his brother until the 1882 publication of Leaves of
Grass (James R. Osgood), which brought him enough money to buy a home in
Camden.

In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman spent his declining years working
on additions and revisions to his deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (David McKay,
1891–92) and preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye My
Fancy (David McKay, 1891). After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was buried
in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Haleigh Cemetery.

Along with Emily Dickinson, he is considered one of America’s most important poets.
(https://poets.org/poet/walt-whitman)

3
An integral part of Whitman’s poetry is the celebration of the unique democratic nature
of the nation of America. This poem, published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass,
offers a picture of this democratic nation that has the quintessential spirit of the
American life, as imagined by Whitman, oozing out of it. In order to capture that spirit,
the poet imagines the entire nation is singing songs. These songs are diverse in origin
and are sung by people of different types but still all of them have merged and formed
the song of America the nation in its entirety. This nation is indeed democratic but that
has not cost anybody their individuality. In order to portray this idea, the poet uses one
images after another that depict different groups all of whom contribute in one way or
the other to help America move forward. Their songs are multifarious and yet together
they form that vibrant song of life hearing which the poet utters: “I hear America
singing, the varied carols I hear”. Then follows the description of the workers. The
point to be noted about the description of these workers is that none of them are sitting
idle. Rather, all are busy with hard work. Whitman has deliberately selected workers
who are frequently considered as marginal. He tries to emphasize that these are the
true faces of America, the building nation, the moving nation. The first three images
therefore depict the mechanics, the carpenter and the mason, singing. They begin,
carry on and even end their works along with singing which shows they enjoy every
part of it. These three images are images of people who are literally building America.
Then come the boatman and the deckhand. They too sing while they help to move the
nation faster. Whitman’s vision of America seems to cover almost every nook of
America as next appear the shoemaker, the hatter, the wood-cutter and even the
ploughboy. The poem insists that not a single person amongst these is insignificant,
all are contributing substantially. So far the poem seems to be concentrating a bit too
much upon workers of the male sex but the poet brings in the images of the female
workers immediately after the section depicting the males to strike a proper balance.
The females of the three major age groups- the mother, the young wife the adolescent
girl are all mentioned. Their activities have equal importance. The poem accentuates
the fact that each of these people are singing only that song which exclusively belongs
to him or her in the line: “Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else”.
This lively poem rounds off by evoking a picture of mirth. If the day time of America
is filled with the resonating rhythm of songs of people at work, the nights of this lively
nation become euphonious with melodious songs that celebrate their successful
endeavours.

1.3 SING THE BODY ELECTRIC

This poem, consisting of nine sections in its final form, was initially titled “Poem of
the Body”. Though the final title underscores the power of the body, the previous one
seems no less a proper one as this indeed is very much a poem about the human body
of flesh and blood, irrespective of colour or gender. This is one such poem that shows
Whitman celebrating the human body. He definitely does not merely want to inverse
the soul superior body inferior structure, but he actually wants to argue that both are
equal. He wants to celebrate “the form complete”. The key issues of the separate
sections are discussed below:
4
SECTION 1: The opening section announces the poet’s intention. He forms a picture
where bodies of human beings surround him who, according to him, want the poet to
purify their bodies by charging them with the charm of the soul. The phrase ‘body
electric’ seems to have a connection to the Eighteenth century’s famous discovery of
the electric nature of the human body. Despite such discoveries, the importance of the
body was hardly asserted. Instead, it is always given an inferior status, next to the soul.
The poem attacks this notion and asks: “if the body were not the soul, what is the
soul?” This seems to be Whitman’s response against those who have created the
discourse about the bawdiness of the body.

SECTION 2: The poem tries to reveal the fact that the body is glorious from top to
toe and this section is the one that depicts this idea brilliantly. Firstly, it is clarified
that body means both the female and the male and both are perfect. Secondly, the poem
challenges the age old notions of Physiognomy, particularly that of Sir Thomas
Browne that gave importance to the facial portion of the human body for the study of
the mind. In place of that this section points out:

“…the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, It is in his limbs
and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,”. This section then
offers a picturesque catalogue of the human body of different sexes, different age
groups, and professions busy at their unique works. The poet joyfully asserts: “The
natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv’d neck and the counting; such-
like I love”.

SECTION 3: The third section focuses upon the body of an individual. Technically
he has nothing that special about him but the facts that he has five sons, all of whom
contain the seed of producing their progeny and a body that looks quite robust even at
the age of eighty make him appear as an embodiment of the power of the human body.
This section extols this old man because he has a physique that proves that the common
notion about the human body at the old age is not entirely true. This eighty year old
man’s body seems to suggest that “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”,
is hardly a correct a description of an old man.

SECTION 4: A very important statement is made here which removes the enmity
between body and soul. The poet insists that physical presence of human bodies have
a positive effect upon the mind. Unlike a loneliness-loving poet he states: “I have
perceived that to be with those I like is enough, to stop in company with the rest at
evening is enough, to be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is
enough”. He further argues that this is not typical to him alone, the soul in general gets
pleased by the company of the body. Even the very smell of the body pleases the soul.
The last line sets this particular pleasure apart from the other kinds by stating: “All
things please the soul, but these please the soul well.”

5
SECTIONS 5 & 6: These two sections offer Whitman’s powerful statements about
the female and the male body respectively. It is to be noted that the fifth section,
dealing with the female body is one of the largest of the whole poem. The fifth section
glorifies the woman body imagining it as the entrance to both soul and the body. It
highlights the unique power of the female body – it begets a child that later becomes
a full grown man who once more has to come back to the female body for procreation.
Whitman observes: “The female contains all qualities and tempers them, She is in her
place and moves with perfect balance, She is all things duly veil’d, she is both passive
and active, She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters.”
. Equally powerful is the male body. The next section shows the unique things a male
body is capable of. If the woman’s body displays features with depth, the man’s
according to this section has impulse and vigour. Though one might feel like charging
the poem with a slight gender bias at this point, the line: “The man’s body is sacred
and the woman’s body is sacred” seems to purge the poem. One needs to understand
that the poet wants to show the uniqueness of both sexes.

SECTIONS 7 & 8: If the previous two sections glorify the human body of both sexes,
these two sections shed light on the darkest business done using the human body. The
seventh section lashes the slavery system of America quite powerfully. He depicts a
painful scene from the slave market where a black man’s body is up for sale. He mocks
this, stating: “Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it”. He
reminds that the veins of these black men’s body do carry the same red blood. He even
seems to attack the discursive ideas that tried to equate the black men with primitive
men by asking the white community a burning question: “Who might you find you
have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries?” The
auctioning of a woman’s body which seems to refer to the tradition of prostitution too
is to be looked down upon. The poem tries to bring to everyone’s mind that “She too
is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers, she is the bearer of them that
shall grow and be mates to the mothers.” Conclusion: Finally the poem ends with the
last section’s remarkable cataloguing of every minute details of the human body. Not
only flesh and blood but “Upper-arm, armpit, elbow socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews,
arm-bone” or “The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean” are
also mentioned prominently. The way the last two lines justify the use of these images
is excellent. The poet explains to his readers that the parts mentioned, the poem itself
as a whole is not simply about the body. Rather he says, “O I say now these are the
soul!”

1.4 COME UP FROM THE FIELDS FATHER

Whitman’s poems not only depicted an idealized version of America but it also
reflected his contemporary situation. He responded to the important social events of
his time very significantly. It was quite natural that the Civil War in America too
would impregnate him with thoughts. Poems written by him in response to the Civil
War belong to his collection Drum-Taps and its sequel. War is generally depicted in
literature in two opposite ways. There are some who glorify war and produce poems
6
that encourage people to join it and on the other hand there are poets who criticize war
by unmasking its romantic veil. Generally poets who do not have a direct experience
of the battle grounds romanticize war and since Whitman had not participated in the
Civil War, he did consider this unrest as something positive because he felt this to be
a solution to the rift between the two halves of the nation. Driven by such a thought
he even wrote the recruitment poem “Beat! Beat! Drums!” Such an ecstatic attitude
about the war started changing soon. Whitman had joined the service of attending the
wounded soldiers and there he came face to face with the horror of war. Moreover, his
brother George’s joining the force and his subsequent injury made him directly share
the pain and anxiety of all those families who had their members out amongst the guns.
Combining the sympathy he felt as an attendant to the soldiers and the anxiety he
experienced as a brother, Whitman produces this moving account of a family’s
reaction about their son’s injury in the battle. The poem has a dramatic quality. It
begins with the voice of the anxious little daughter of the family asking her father and
mother to look at the letter from their dear Pete. After addressing the parents, the girl
suddenly starts describing the beautiful nature that surrounds them. It is autumn all
over, the season of fulfilment. Nothing in nature indicates even a bit of unrest but
amidst this comes this letter whose arrival was desired and yet its arrival also brings
anxiety. The letter delivers shocking hints to the parents. They realize that it is written
by somebody else which alone is alarming enough. Besides, it informs that their dear
son is wounded severely. The line: “At present low, but will soon be better.” In
particular seems to have a sinister irony hidden beneath. The daughter tries to console
the mother referring to that vague line but she knew in her heart of hearts that she had
lost her child. Whitman here uses his experience as an attendant to the soldiers. Quite
often they would become unable to write letters due to fatal injuries and besides often
the soldier died even before the letter was delivered. So these letters that included the
formal consolation that the wounded will recover soon were hardly capable of
speaking the truth. The poem ends with the description of how the mother turns into a
melancholic person after getting this letter. The heart touching last line states that after
that ominous moment the mother did not live life but only moved forward to death as
that alone could re-unite her with her son.

1.5 O CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN

The signature style of Whitman seems to be his use of informal lines. His lines glow
with spontaneity but this poem seems to have a different radiance altogether. This has
brilliant use of rhythm and meter that almost gives it the quality of a march past song.
Actually the difference in the poem seems to have originated from its unique purpose.
This was one of the four poems Whitman wrote in the memory of the death of
Abraham Lincoln. Amongst the four this one has a technical gloss that is so different
from Whitman’s typical style. The suddenness of Lincoln’s assassination had petrified
the entire nation and this seems to be a song penned by the poet for the entire nation’s
catharsis. It is not simply an elegy but a unique combination of dramatic impulse and
elegiac intensity. The poem uses the metaphor of a ship and its voyage to tell the story
of America’s journey through the troubled years. The troubles of Civil War seems to
7
be depicted using the image of the sea. The poem opens at a moment when this perilous
journey has been successfully completed and the entire nation is standing at the shores
rejoicing and waiting to welcome their champions. Amidst this joyous atmosphere,
fate seems to strike a bolt from the blue as suddenly the able captain of the ship is
found dead on the deck. Death enters the poem with such an abruptness that the
welcome ovation instantly loses its mirth for the narrator.

The poem depicts the entire scene using its three carefully crafted stanzas. The first
announces the shocking news. The second contrasts the celebration taking place
outside with the petrified condition of the ship where the great man lies “fallen cold
and dead”. It also makes one last attempt to wake the dear father of the nation up and
finally the ship arrives with the body and the mourning companion who is now given
the heart-breaking task of revealing this shocking news to the jolly crowd. The
structure of the poem seems to resemble that of a tragedy. It has its climax, anagnorisis
and peripatetic arranged wonderfully. The final stanza offers the catastrophe and one
can almost feel the kind of cathartic effect that the mourning nation must have felt
while humming this wonderful yet tragic song by the poet of America.

From Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen
Ginsberg; from Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer to June Jordan and Michael
Harper; from Meridel LeSueur and Muriel Rukeyser to Patricia Hampl and Sharon
Olds; from D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf to Charles Tomlinson and Anthony
Burgess; from José Martí to Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges; from Rubén Darío,
Fernando Pessoa, and Federico García Lorca to Rudolfo Anaya, Garrett Hongo,
Maxine Hong Kingston, and Yusef Komunyakaa—the intense urge on the part of
writers to talk back to Whitman has cut across boundaries of race, ethnicity,
nationality, and gender.

This monograph has a direct relationship to our editorial work with the Walt Whitman
Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org). That project has convinced us that a new kind of
introductory book on Whitman now needs to be written. In our ongoing efforts to re-
edit Whitman's work on the web, we are motivated not so much by a desire to
reproduce in electronic form the many things brilliantly accomplished by the
monumental Collected Writings of Walt Whitman (22 volumes, New York University
Press, 1961-84) as by a desire to address the dated scholarship, and the gaps, peculiar
orderings, errors, incoherencies, and other inadequacies, that characterize that edition.
Perhaps the oddest choice made by the New York University Press editors was never
to present, anywhere in the 22 volumes, a straightforward printing of the first edition
of Leaves of Grass, a document of primary importance in literary history. In fact, with
the exception of the final "deathbed" edition of Leaves (so called because copies were
brought to Whitman during his final illness), one can only imaginatively construct the
different editions from the textual notes and lists of variants in the Variorum Edition
(LG Var.).

8
Another curiosity is the omission of Whitman's poetry manuscripts, an especially
strange choice because the New York University Press edition includes a hefty amount
of material of minor importance, meticulously edited and annotated. The three-volume
Variorum Edition of Leaves of Grass was originally slated to present all the
manuscripts, periodical publications, and book publications of Whitman's poems, but
it ended up dealing only with the book publications, leaving the important manuscript
origins and early periodical versions all but inaccessible. A projected second Variorum
Edition, dealing with materials not accounted for in the first Variorum, has never
materialized. Our electronic archive is steadily making available an increasing number
of poetry manuscripts, a development that is revealing a previously unknown side of
Whitman's creative process.

We therefore call our book Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life
and Work. Every book about Whitman, of course, rewrites the script of Whitman's life
and work, altering the meaning of his work and emphasizing certain events in his life.
Our book certainly re-scripts Whitman in that sense, but our title is further meant to
suggest a recurring emphasis in the following pages: we are rethinking Whitman's life
in terms of his script, those thousands of manuscript pages that he left behind and
which, to this day, have not been adequately studied. Whitman has always been
thought of as the "poet of print," the newspaperman who learned to set type and who
often took his poetry manuscripts to print shops to have them set in type so that he
could see immediately what they would look like on the printed page. Because of this,
we often have viewed Whitman as a poet who begins and ends in print, when in fact
he laboured hard in script. From his early notebooks, where we can trace the first seeds
of Leaves of Grass, through his final years, where he struggled against failing health
to scribble out his last poems, Whitman's most intense struggles were in script, in that
tough, originating workshop where words first meet paper. That's where the process
began that resulted in Whitman's eventual identification of himself with his book.

1.6 OUT OF THE CRADLE ENDLESSLY ROCKING: THE TEXT

OUT of the cradle endlessly rocking,

Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child
leaving his bed wander'd alone, bareheaded, barefoot,
Down from the shower'd halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if
they were alive,
Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with
tears,
From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,
9
From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous'd words,
From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
From such as now they start the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, unite of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing.

Once Paumanok,
When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was
growing,
Up this seashore in some briers,
Two feather'd guests from Alabama, two together,
And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,
And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,
And every day the she-bird crouch'd on her nest, silent, with
bright eyes,
And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing
them,
Cautiously peering, absorbing, and translating.
Shine! shine! shine!
Pour down your warmth, great sun!
While we bask, we two together.

Two together!
Winds blow south, or winds blow north,
Day come white, or night come black,
Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
Singing all time, minding no time,
While we two keep together.

Till of a sudden,
May-be kill'd, unknown to her mate,
One forenoon the she-bird crouch'd not on the nest,
Nor return'd that afternoon, nor the next,
Nor ever appear'd again.

And thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea,

And at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather,

Over the hoarse surging of the sea,

10
Or flitting from brier to brier by day,
I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird,
The solitary guest from Alabama.

Blow! blow! blow!

Blow up sea-winds along Paumanok's shore;
I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me.

Yes, when the stars glisten'd,

All night long on the prong of a moss-scallop'd stake,
Down almost amid the slapping waves,
Sat the lone singer wonderful causing tears.

He call'd on his mate,

He pour'd forth the meanings which I of all men know.

Yes my brother I know,

The rest might not, but I have treasur'd every note,
For more than once dimly down to the beach gliding,
Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the shadows,
Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and
sights after their sorts,
The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,
I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,
Listen'd long and long.

Listen'd to keep, to sing, now translating the notes,

Following you my brother.

Soothe! soothe! soothe!

Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close,
But my love soothes not me, not me.

Low hangs the moon, it rose late,

It is lagging—O I think it is heavy with love, with love.

O madly the sea pushes upon the land,

With love, with love.

O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?

What is that little black thing I see there in the white?

Loud! loud! loud!

Loud I call to you, my love!

11
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!
O moon do not keep her from me any longer.

Land! land! O land!

Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate
back again if you only would,
For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.

O rising stars!
Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some
of you.

O throat! O trembling throat!

Sound clearer through the atmosphere!
Pierce the woods, the earth,
Somewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want.

Shake out carols!

Solitary here, the night's carols!
Carols of lonesome love! death's carols!
Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!
O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea!
O reckless despairing carols.

But soft! sink low!

Soft! let me just murmur,
And do you wait a moment you husky-nois'd sea,
For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,
So faint, I must be still, be still to listen,
But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately
to me.

Hither my love!
Here I am! here!
With this just-sustain'd note I announce myself to you,
This gentle call is for you my love, for you.

Do not be decoy'd elsewhere,

12
That is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice,
That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray,
Those are the shadows of leaves.

O darkness! O in vain!
O I am very sick and sorrowful.

O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea!
O troubled reflection in the sea!
O throat! O throbbing heart!
And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night.

O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!

In the air, in the woods, over fields,
Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!
But my mate no more, no more with me!
We two together no more.

The aria sinking,

All else continuing, the stars shining,
The winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous echoing,
With angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly moaning,
On the sands of Paumanok's shore gray and rustling,
The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face
of the sea almost touching,
The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the
atmosphere dallying,
The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting,
The aria's meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,
The strange tears down the cheeks coursing,
The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,
The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,
To the boy's soul's questions sullenly timing, some drown'd secret
hissing,
To the out setting bard.

Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul,)

Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
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 echoes have started to life within me, never
to die.

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O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
O solitary me listening, never more 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.

O give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)

O if I am to have so much, let me have more!

A word then, (for I will conquer it,)

The word final, superior to all,
Subtle, sent up—what is it?—I listen;
Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-
waves?
Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?

Whereto answering, the sea,

Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before day-
break,
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 leaving me softly all
over,
Death, death, death, death, death.

Which I do not forget,

But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother,
That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok's gray beach,
With the thousand responsive songs at random,
My own songs awaked from that hour,
And with them the key, the word up from the waves,
The word of the sweetest song and all songs,
That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,
(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet
garments, bending aside,)
The sea whisper'd me.

14
1.7 OUT OF THE CRADLE ENDLESSLY ROCKING: ANALYSIS

"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" is one of Whitman's most moving and difficult
poems. The poem was first published under the title "A Child's Reminiscence" in the
New York Saturday Press for 24 December 1859, with the opening verse paragraph
bearing the heading "Pre-Verse." The issue contained also a notice on the editorial
page probably written by Henry Clapp, the editor of the Press and a close friend of
Whitman, which terms the poem "our Christmas or New Year's present to [our
readers]." When the Cincinnati Daily Commercial published an attack upon the poem
a few days later, the Saturday Press of 7 January 1860 reprinted the attack along with
an anonymous response by Whitman entitled "All About a Mocking-Bird." There, in
one of his first defences against hostile criticism, Whitman justifies the poem and his
craft and prophesies a new edition of Leaves of Grass, what would become the 1860
edition. "Out of the Cradle" appeared in that edition as "A Word Out of the Sea," with
the heading "Reminiscence" placed between the first and second verse paragraphs.
Whitman made several changes in the poem for the 1867 edition, used the title "Out
of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" for the first time in the 1871 edition, and gave the
poem virtually its final form in the 1881 edition. In the Deathbed edition, it stands
prominently at the head of the "Sea-Drift section.

"Out of the Cradle" dominates the "Sea-Drift" grouping because it condenses

Whitman's themes of love, death, sexuality, loss, and their relation to language and
poetry into a single setting and situation. On the beach at night, a curious boy wanders
alone, witnessing two birds living and loving together. Then one vanishes, the other
searches fruitlessly, the boy questions also only to hear the ocean's final assertion of
death, and the man notes "My own songs awaked from that hour." Here is Whitman
narrating his awakening to death and his simultaneous projection into poesy. Out of
this primal scene of eros and thanatos, of a "musical shuttle" made of "pains and joys,"
Whitman derives an intense and sombre lesson in mortality and inspiration.

However, despite the ardour of the experience described, "Out of the Cradle" is
remarkable in that here Whitman reveals a masterful formal control of his material.
The opening of the poem is a tour de force of poetic suspense: a single sentence,
twenty-two lines of sustained anaphora and parallelism, of gliding prepositional
phrases and arousing half-allusions culminating in the simple bardic verb "sing." This
haunting recitation introduces the four voices in the poem—bird, boy, man, sea—and
arranges them into a sequence of "afflatus." That is, the bird calls "those beginning
notes of yearning and love," the boy listens and "translate[s]" them as the italicized
lines in the poem, the man records the translation and comments on the boy's
condition, and the sea taciturnly provides the final word on the matter, the "word of
the sweetest song and all songs"—death. And out of the boy's observance of love and
loss and his hearkening to the sea's "hissing" iteration, "Death, death, death, death,
death," comes a new destiny for the boy—to become a spirit dedicated to poetry. As
the boy listens to the he-bird's progress from odes to timeless love to lament over the
15
disappearance of the she-bird to peals of desperate hope that his love may return to
piercing recognition of perpetual loss, the boy (as reflected upon by the man) turns to
the sea for explanation, for some "clew" as to why such suffering comes about. The
sea's patient answer solves nothing. Instead, it lifts the question out of its local context,
provoking a universalization of the she-bird's departure, a conversion of individual
pain into natural law.

This is the inspiration to sing, to write poetry. If death is not exactly the birth of
language, it is the birth of song, the mother of beauty. As the essays by Stephen
Whicher, Paul Fussell, Richard Chase, and Roy Harvey Pearce (all printed in an
English Institute volume entitled The Presence of Walt Whitman) attest, "Out of the
Cradle" raises the prospect of annihilation and concludes that there is nothing to do
about it but sing it. In doing so, the poem places itself in a traditional genre of poems
recounting the birth of poetry out of death. That is, "Out of the Cradle" dramatizes an
archetypal experience of loss and reaches a familiar outcome: verse. In this genre,
there is nothing else to do with irreversible loss but to describe its happening. How
else can the bird recall his absent object of desire but by announcing its absence until
his "carol" becomes in Whitman's rendition a worldwide annunciation? What else can
Whitman make of his forsakenness but to dramatize it, to generalize bereavement into
a human condition, the word of all songs? One love is lost, and all of life is changed.

This poetic psychodrama has led other scholars to interpret the love-loss-poetry
pattern as it appears in "Out of the Cradle" in psych biographical terms. Certainly the
poem's language and narrative lend themselves to psychological description, with
phrases such as "The unknown want, the destiny of me," or "A man, yet by these tears
a little boy again," or "cries of unsatisfied love" virtually soliciting a reading that
borrows upon concepts of repression and the unconscious. Accordingly, critics such
as Gustav Bychowski, Edwin Haviland Miller, Stephen Black, David Cavitch, and M.
Jimmie Killingsworth have read the poem using a more or less psychoanalytical
framework. Read within the purview of the unconscious, Whitman's poetic
expressions come to be seen as the culmination of a psychic process, one characterized
by sublimation and substitution and displacement. Psychoanalytical interpretation
entails recovering clearly the psychic content which "Out of the Cradle" represents in
a distorted fashion. That is, it begins with Whitman's oedipal situation—a complex
one, especially considering his excessively adoring portraits of his mother and his
virtual silence about his father—and decodes the poem accordingly.

In this case, "Out of the Cradle" and its story of ideal love and traumatic separation
and the abandoned he-bird's all-encompassing lament actually re-enact Whitman's
own trauma of separation. In the boy's humble testimony, Whitman vicariously
expresses the pain of loss, the withdrawal of, perhaps, mother or recent lover (indeed,
the latter would only be an aggravation of the former). The peremptory voice of the
maternal sea marks Whitman expanding the source of that pain beyond his real mother,
thereby expanding (or repressing) his desires away from the narcissistic needs of the
infant. Whitman still desires to overcome separation, to re-experience the "oceanic

16
feeling" characterizing the mother-new-born relation, but that unity must now come
at a cosmic level, not a personal one. (This may be because of his mother's threatening
aspect, her tendency to absorb Walt's ego into her own, or because of his father's
intemperate, distant attitude toward him.) Individual love means loss and dereliction,
along with all the guilt and abjection that the ego takes upon itself to explain that
catastrophe. But if that excruciating loneliness and self-recrimination—that emotional
death—be linked to a universal lament, then Whitman may feel involved in a larger
process of life and death, unified with all other things that experience the same pain.
If this cosmic unification marks yet another sublimation, it is a creative one, more
comprehensive and orderly than the he-bird's despairing cries or the boy's confused
inquisitions.

Of course, this rough approximation of psych biographical interpretations of "Out of

the Cradle" smooth out differences in the readings offered by the critics mentioned
above. It also does not take into account a methodological question: How does the
poem represent Whitman's psycho-sexual tensions? This question is posed by another
group of readings of "Out of the Cradle." These readings may be termed "theoretical"
in that they ask not so much about the content of the representation as they explore the
relation between representation and represented, psyche and word, intention and
expression.

In theoretical readings of "Out of the Cradle" by critics such as Diane Wood

Middlebrook, Kerry Larson, and Mark Bauerlein, the focus lies on the nature of the
process of translation carried out in the poem. If the poem records Whitman's
discovery of his "tongue's use," then the poem must proceed to show how the boy-
man-poet learns to translate life and death into words that affect others, to transform
formative experiences and dim memories into songs that transcend their
circumstances. What is exceptional about "Out of the Cradle" in this respect is
precisely the translation model Whitman sets his poetic inspiration within. For, as
opposed to most conceptions of poetic origins, Whitman locates his inspiration in
another's experience—the mockingbird's—and assumes the duty of translator, not
originator of pathos. He becomes a singer of "warbling echoes" and "reverberations,"
imitating, "perpetuating" the bird, who is himself an imitator, a mockingbird. In other
words, Whitman's birth as a poet happens when he joins a procession of singers and
listeners—mockingbird, boy, man, poet, reader—attending to the cries of lonesome
love.

This is what distinguishes his song from the bird's song. Upon losing his love, the bird
remains frenzied, disbelieving, his cries addressing solely his loss, his pain allowing
for no other realization but the return of his love. Even when he does begin to accept
the loss, all he can do is repeat "Loved!" five times and say blankly, "But my mate no
more, no more with me! " His lament remains self-centred, eventually trailing off into
self-torture and despair. His song cannot succeed the way Whitman's does because he
has no awareness of joining in a procession of communications, of communion. He
fails to realize that poets work by "Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping

17
beyond them," beyond their contingent aspects and beyond the poet's own private
concerns. Conceiving himself as an origin and end of song, the bird-poet can only
insistently repeat his trauma. He needs a translator, one who can recast his notes as a
beautiful permutation of elegiac narrative. Great poets require an apprehension of
more than just their own individuality, and of course the absolute limit to individuality
is death. This is why death is the word of all songs. It forces poets to see and sing
beyond their own personal experience.

Such a conclusion reverses the romantic conception of the poet and belies the
commonplace interpretation of Whitman as the most egotistical of writers. But in "Out
of the Cradle," translation is not a fallen condition and self-absorption is a failure. The
boy who sits in the bushes "translating" the "notes" seems free and natural, wholly
devoid of irony or insincerity or narcissism. Perhaps the connection of innocence and
interpretation contributes to the appeal of "Out of the Cradle." In any case, whether
considered as a supreme instance of conventional elegy, a charged reflection of
psychosexual tensions, or a complex meditation upon how to give words to trauma,
"Out of the Cradle" remains a centrepiece of Whitman's poetry and poetics. In its
poignant evocation of a lonely beach where a "curious boy" sits "peering, absorbing,"
hearing a mockingbird's natural cries of love and despair and feeling those notes turn
to poems within him, "Out of the Cradle" embodies for many the Whitmanian poetic
moment, the emotive origin and measure of his song.

1.8 SUGGESTED READINGS

 Bauerlein, Mark. Whitman and the American Idiom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State UP, 1991.
 Black, Stephen. Whitman's Journeys into Chaos. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975.
 Bychowski, Gustav. "Walt Whitman: A Study in Sublimation." Psychoanalysis
and the Social Sciences. Ed. Geza Roheim. New York: International Universities,
1950. 223-261.
 Cavitch, David. My Soul and I: The Inner Life of Walt Whitman. Boston: Beacon,
1985.
 Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and
the Text. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.
 Larson, Kerry. Whitman's Drama of Consensus. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
 Lewis, R.W.B., ed. The Presence of Walt Whitman. New York: Columbia UP,
1962.
 Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell UP, 1974.
 Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
 Renner, Dennis K. "Reconciling Varied Approaches to 'Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking.'" Approaches to Teaching Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." Ed.
Donald D. Kummings. New York: MLA, 1990. 67-73.

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 Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold
W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.

1.9 LET US SUM UP

"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" is one of Whitman's great poems because of
his use of image and symbol. The title itself is a symbol of birth. The sun and the
moon, the land and the sea, and the stars and the sea waves contribute to the
atmosphere and symbolic scenery in the poem. These images deepen the effect of the
emotions in the poem, as in the bird's song, and are part of the dramatic structure. The
poem is very melodious and rhythmic and may itself be compared to an aria (in opera,
an aria is an elaborate melody sung by one voice). Its use of dactylic and trochaic
meter is very appropriate in describing the motion of the sea waves and their meaning.

1.10 UNIT END QUESTIONS

1. Write a short note on Walt Whitman’s personal life.

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2.Why is “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” considered to be Whitman’s most

difficult poem? Give appropriate reasons to support your answer.
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3. Analyse the poem ‘Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking’ in your own words.
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4.Try to elucidate the word “cradle”, does it have any symbolic meaning attached
to it? If yes, what is it?
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5. What is the deal with ‘Poetic Suspense’ in this poem?

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20
UNIT-2 ROBERT FROST: “STOPPING BY THE
WOODS IN A SNOWY EVENING”

Structure

2.0 Objective
2.1 Introduction
2.2 About the poet, Robert Frost
2.3 Robert Frost's Conversational Style
2.4 Stopping by the Woods in a snowy evening: The text
2.5 Analysis of the poem
2.6 Stylistic Analysis Of Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods On
A Snowy Evening
2.6.1 Graph-logical Category
2.6.2 Foregrounding
2.6.3 Lexical Category
2.6.4 Figurative category
2.7 Let us sum up
2.8 Unit end questions

2.0 OBJECTIVE

After going through this unit, the learners will be able to:
 Analyse Robert Frost’s work and his style of writing
 Critically analyse and appreciate the poem “Stopping by the woods in a
snowy evening”.
 Learn about the conversational style of Frost.

2.1 INTRODUCTION

According to Leech (1969) style leads to the structure, patterns and arrangement of
words to form sentences in spoken or written form. A number of studies have been
conducted to explore the true intentions of the writer and exact theme of literary text
under the domain of literary criticism (Widdowson, 1975). According to Leech and
Short (1981), style is the usage of vocabulary in a particular situation for a specific
aim. They further said that style is a dress of thoughts and a medium for transportation
of thoughts and messages to the readers or listeners. But style varies from person to
person and context to context of the same person (Whales, 1983). Furthermore, she
explains that it is the explanation of the same picture with the same theme but in
different unique ways. So, it is important to study style to comprehend the writing of
any author. The present study deals with the writing style of Robert Frost in the poem
“Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening”.

21
Frost holds a distinctive position in handling the stylistic devices as Abdul Bari and
Summara (2014) stylistically analysed one of the Frost’s poem “The Onset” and
concluded that Frost is very unique in using stylistic devices like imagery, simile,
metaphor, hyperbole and sound devices (alliteration, consonants rhyme scheme) to
show the theme of virtue and evil, dismay and hope and life and death in his poems.
Beside all of these, a comprehensive work needs to be done on a broad level to
highlight the writer’s message hidden in the text. The present study analyses Frost’s
poem “Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening” on five stylistic levels to unfold the
true theme behind this poem. Another study has been conducted by Samia, Bushra and
Arooj (2014) to illustrate the style of Frost in his poem “Bereft” regarding the different
syntactic levels and analysed that Robert Frost used different syntactic devices (nouns,
adjective, pronouns, rhyming scheme, anaphora, anti-thesis, imagery… etc.) to
explore the theme of passed youth loneliness, conflict of mind, hope, and unique
treatment of nature. Here this study is important as it will compare and contrast the
reality of literary criticism and stylistics on scientific terms.

(http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ijel/article/view/0/39597)

2.2 ABOUT THE POET, ROBERT FROST

Robert Lee Frost is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for his work. He also
received many honorary doctoral degrees, although he never actually earned a
bachelor’s degree. An avid teacher and a gifted writer, he is one of America’s most
admired poets of the Twentieth Century. He wrote in traditional poetic forms but with
a twist—capturing the rhythms and vocabulary of ordinary speech. He was a great
man and was very loyal too.

Frost was born March 26, 1874 in San Francisco, California. When his father died
during his childhood, he moved with his mother and sister to Massachusetts. He
attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1892 but dropped out
after a short time, working as a teacher and a factory worker.

Frost sold his poem “My Butterfly: An Elegy” to The Independent of New York in
1894. The next year he married Elinor Miriam White, his high school friend. The two
of them taught school until 1897 when Frost entered Harvard University. He studied
there two years and then moved to a farm in New Hampshire that his grandfather
bought for him. He went back to teaching to support the family.

In 1912 Frost and his family moved to England, where he met Ezra Pound, who was
one of the first people to review Frost’s work, and other notable poets. He published
a book of poetry entitled A Boy’s Will in 1913. He moved back to New Hampshire in
1915 and spent the remainder of his career as a professor in colleges in New
Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont, including the prestigious Amherst College.
During his years as a professor he continued to write poetry and plays. Frost died
January 29, 1963 in Boston, Massachusetts.
22
(https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/American_Literature/20th_Century/Robert_Fro
st)

2.3 ROBERT FROST'S CONVERSATIONAL STYLE

Maurice Charney

Published in Connotations Vol. 10.2-3 (2000/01)

Robert Frost would seem to be the ideal poet for this year's Connotations topic: "The
Poetics of Conversation in 20th−Century Literature." Frost has written many poems
with speakers engaged in conversation like "The Death of the Hired Man" and "A
Hundred Collars" from North of Boston.1) He has written a number of plays, A
Masque of Reason and A Masque of Mercy (and several more in his uncollected
works), and he has always been interested in distinctive New England speakers who
are highly characterized and who function like dramatic characters. In terms of poetic
technique, Frost favors the iambic pentameter line, with its connotations of
Shakespearean blank verse, ideally suited to dramatic speakers. But Frost also uses the
iambic tetrameter line that Andrew Marvell found so supple in the seventeenth
century. Frost's pentameter and tetrameter lines are sometimes rhymed as couplets,
showing his affinity with witty, eloquent, epigrammatic−like statement of such a poet
as Pope in the eighteenth century. In addition, Frost cultivates a refined conversational
diction and a syntax that follows speech rhythms and patterns.

I could enumerate more derivations in Frost's conversational style, but the point is that
this style doesn't try to imitate the inconsequentialities of spoken discourse. Frost is
not at all like David Mamet or Harold Pinter, although these two dramatists are
probably just as far from the realities of everyday conversation as Frost. We need to
establish as an assumption that conversation, or the semblance of conversation, in
poetry is radically different from the language that we ourselves speak or that we hear
others speak in public. Like dramatic dialogue, Frost's conversational style is an
artfully fabricated imitation of ordinary conversation. Frost may have had an
especially acute ear for New England speech because he was born in San Francisco
and spent his early years there.

I would like to begin my talk with a fairly early poem, "The Runaway" from New
Hampshire (1923). I heard Robert Frost read this poem a number of times, so that my
account is obviously influenced by this reading. Frost was notorious for making small
revisions while he read, but I don't remember any significant variations for "The
Runaway." The poem is written in blank verse and is about a young colt who has run
away from its native stall and is acting in a very skittish manner. The horse is
specifically a Morgan. Following Frost's own reading, the poem is highly
onomatopoetic, with the sound of the words and the rhythm of the speech imitating
the sense of the poem. For example, the last line, "Ought to be told to come and take
him in," has ten monosyllables which mimic the sound of the frightened colt's hooves
as he "mounts the wall again with whited eyes."
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Onomatopoeia is an often discussed abstract ideal of poetry. Much, of course, depends
on the reading to make the onomatopoeia effective. I always mistakenly thought that
the final line was repeated twice, with the second time giving the sense of a quiet echo.
Perhaps I heard Frost himself read it that way! It's a coincidence that the poem right
next to "The Runaway" in New Hampshire is "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening," which ends with the repetition of the final line, "And miles to go before I
sleep."

Onomatopoeia as a poetic concept is problematical because sounds are language

specific. In English the rooster cries "cock−a−doodle−do," whereas in French it is
"cocorico," in German "kikeriki", in Spanish "quiquiriqui" (much like the German),
but in Yiddish it is "kookerikoo." Clearly the rooster in the barnyard makes none of
these sounds, and the stage direction in Hamlet for "one to crow" to indicate the rising
sun is entirely different from the sounds recorded in dictionaries. For example, another
onomatopoetic line in "The Runaway" is "He dipped his head ⁄ And snorted at us,"
which is mostly monosyllabic. The onomatopoetic effect probably comes from the
verbs "dipped" and "snorted," but I wouldn't want to press this argument too closely.
The poem identifies a "We" as the observers of the events in "The Runaway": "We
stopped by a mountain pasture to say, 'Whose colt?'" In the middle of the poem,
however, "I" speaks six lines beginning "'I think the little fellow's afraid of the snow.'"
The anapestic "Of the snow" gives a special emphasis to the snow rather than just
snow, as if it is a big snowfall, what is called in the first line "the snow of the year."
The conversational effect is helped by a consistent elision, as in "fellow's afraid,"
Isn't," "He's," "It's," "He'd," "didn't," and "can't." The speaker continues:

"He isn't winter−broken. It isn't play

With the little fellow at all. He's running away.
I doubt if even his mother could tell him, 'Sakes,
It's only weather.' He'd think she didn't know!
Where is his mother? He can't be out alone."

There are a number of metrical irregularities in these lines, as in "He isn't

winter−broken. It isn't play ⁄ With the little fellow at all." After "winter−broken," the
caesura emphasizes the non−iambic pattern, which is echoed by the stress−pattern of
"With the little." In the representation of the colt's mother, Frost introduces a playful
anthropomorphism. She speaks the only really colloquial word in the poem, "Sakes,"
which is a country form of "for God's sake," or "land sakes." But the mother
personified is made to speak in an offhand, gnarled, and gnomic style: "Sakes, ⁄ It's
only weather," as if the change in weather—the snowfall—can fully account for the
colt's erratic behaviour. Frost continues the personification in the colt's imagined
response to his mother: "He'd think she didn't know!" This is the only specific
exclamation in the poem, and it characterizes the colt as a headstrong, rebellious child
chafing at parental control.

24
The 21−line poem concludes with "I" speaking the final three lines, which represent
an aphoristic summing up:
"Whoever it is that leaves him out so late,
When other creatures have gone to stall and bin,
Ought to be told to come and take him in."

Of course, if the colt is running away, there is no "Whoever" to represent agency and
purpose, but this is like many other Frost poems in implying that there is some sort of
Fate or Nature that causes seemingly random events. It clearly indicates purpose in the
universe because "Whoever" badly needs advice: "Ought to be told to come and take
him in." Something needs to be set right in nature. The little Morgan colt has been left
out in the snow "so late, ⁄ When other creatures have gone to stall and bin." Presumably
these creatures are the domestic animals of the Peaceable Kingdom. Someone—
"Whoever"—looks after them and "Ought to be told" how to right an obvious wrong.
Another aspect of the poem's conversationality is its ironic, mock−heroic tone,
something very familiar in Frost's poetry. The poet seems self−conscious about
rendering ordinary happenings of rural life in epical terms. For example, "We heard
the miniature thunder where he fled" is comic in its mingling of great and small.
Thunder can hardly be miniature. The commotion of the runaway colt that
immediately follows the six−line speech of "I" in the middle of the poem is made both
grandiose and ludicrous by the use of unheroic details:

And now he comes again with clatter of stone,

And mounts the wall again with whited eyes
And all his tail that isn't hair up straight.
He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.

The colt's immature tail that isn't yet hair and the fly image in the last line to indicate
the horse's twitching mark a pretension to epic behavior that belies the clatter of stone
and the mounting of the wall with whited eyes. The tone of the poem deliberately
miniaturizes its youthful protagonist, who is not yet capable of bringing off the grand
gestures to which he pretends.

"The Death of the Hired Man" from North of Boston (1914), but written much earlier,
is one of Frost's best known poems, a dramatic, dialogue poem written in blank verse.
It has a sharp emphasis on narrative as it tells its dramatic story about the return of
Silas, the hired man, to the farm of Mary and Warren. Most of the conversation is
between Mary and her husband Warren, with Mary represented as sympathetic and
Warren as skeptical. The blank verse is supple and moves easily, and goes together
with definite syntactical indications of conversation. These are mostly marked by
dashes for abrupt breaks in the syntax. For example, Mary says to her husband:

"When I came up from Rowe's I found him here,

Huddled against the barn−door fast asleep,
A miserable sight, and frightening, too—

25
You needn't smile—I didn't recognize him—
I wasn't looking for him—and he's changed.
Wait till you see."
The dashes follow Mary's train of thought—they are really isolated exclamations that
indicate Mary's surprise and her lack of a definite purpose. We even have a specifically
dramatic effect—"You needn't smile"—bringing Warren's reaction into Mary's
discourse. "Rowe's" is obviously the name of a store in town otherwise unidentified.
The pentameter beat is fairly regular with a few exceptions like "Huddled" in the
second line. The conversational style shows strong emotions in the highly
characterized speaker.

There are many other examples of broken syntax marked by dashes to give the effect
of conversation. For example, Mary is talking again:

"Warren, I wish you could have heard the way

He jumbled everything. I stopped to look
Two or three times—he made me feel so queer—
To see if he was talking in his sleep.
He ran on Harold Wilson—you remember—
The boy you had in haying four years since."

Mary interpolates her thoughts in parenthetic statements within her narrative account
as in "he made me feel so queer" and "you remember." The breaks are essential to
indicate the speaker's self−consciousness and her awareness of the person to whom
she is speaking. Again, some trochaic feet come at the beginnings of lines as in
"Warren" in line 1 and "Two or three times" in line 3. Frost uses colloquial diction as
in "jumbled" and "he made me feel so queer," and even more emphatically in "He ran
on," meaning that Silas spoke extensively about "The boy you had in haying," "had
in" meaning hired to do the haying. Mary says that she "stopped to look" to see if Silas
was talking in his sleep when she means literally that she stopped to listen. Frost
exercises a continuous sense of displacement to jar us away from what we expect to
hear onto a particularly dramatic and highly characterized narrative.

(https://www.connotations.de/article/maurice-charney-robert-frosts-conversational-
style/)

2.4 STOPPING BY THE WOODS IN A SNOWY EVENING: THE TEXT

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near
26
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

2.5 ANALYSIS OF THE POEM

Stanza 1

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

The poem starts with a hint of doubt shown by the narrator about ownership of the
forest that lies in his path towards his destination. The narrator talks about knowing
who might be the owner of a lightly forested area, which is represented by the word
woods, and he may be living in a village near to this area. Since he lives a little far
away from this area, he will not see the narrator look at or appreciate his forest in
which the falling snow settle on its tress and falls on the ground.

The stanza displays that the narrator’s mood at this point of time is extremely pensive
and philosophical to some extent. It shows that the narrator considers the whole
experience of getting to see a forest during winter time as a privilege.

The Rhyming takes place in the first, second and the fourth line of the stanza in form
of words know, though and snow respectively.

Stanza 2

My little horse must think its queer

To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
the darkest evening of the year

The narrator says that his horse would find it odd for them both to stop by an area
which is not their stated destination. This shows that the narrator is currently working
27
in a country side or a rural area. And the fact that the horse knows that they have to
stop by a farmhouse also hints at the fact that the task they are doing is not a new one
and the narrator might be doing it in a repeated manner as and when required.
The area is described to be having a forest with a lake that has frozen in the winter
season and at this point of time it happens to be an evening which he considers to be
the darkest one of that particular year.

This stanza gives a more vivid description of the scene in terms of the time of the day
and the geographic features of the forest.

It also tells us about the destination of the narrator which offers some food for thought
about the nature and the location of the profession of the narrator.

The Rhyming takes place in the first, second and the fourth line of the stanza in form
of words queer, near and year respectively.

Stanza 3

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The narrator then says that his horse makes a little movement which shakes up bells
attached to his harness. This he considers as a questioning act which is deliberately
done, by the horse, to raise the point about the narrator forgetting the correct address
of their destination. But the tinkling sound of the bells gets suppressed by the sound
being produced in the whole area due to the blowing wind and the snowfall.

This stanza reflects the symbiotic relationship that the narrator shares with his horse
which shows that the narrator regularly travels by the means of horse riding and he
and his horse know each other due to their travels together. It also tells us about the
ambient sound due to the wind blowing loudly and the snow fall as they both are taking
place simultaneously.

The Rhyming takes place in the first, second and the fourth line of the stanza in form
of words shake, mistake and flake respectively.

Stanza 4
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep

28
The narrator beautifies and adjectivites the joyful beauty of that lovely, dark and deep
forest by saying that its scenery is beautiful and attractive and charming but he has
duties to do. And then he emphasizes upon the fact that he has a lot of distance to cover
to reach out to his destination which can then set him free to relax and rest.

This stanza has a very deep meaning and it illuminates the psyche of the narrator. It
seems that the narrator finds the forest very attractive and yearns to spend some time
near it & admire the surroundings. But he has tasks to complete and promises to keep,
promises he made to his loved ones and himself. This shows that he is focused and
professional due to which he is able to concentrate on his work and perform in a better
manner. The Narator ends the poem with the last two lines which has a deep meaning,
the narator says that he has 'miles to go' before he sleeps. This sleep here means death
and when he will die. He says he has miles, meaning there is a long time before his
endless sleep. The previous lines mean that he must accomplish his tasks at hand and
keep his promises in the miles left until his sleep.

The Rhyming takes place in the first, second and the third line of the stanza in form of
words deep, keep and sleep respectively.

The third and fourth lines of the stanza are a case of Repetition which is done to
emphasize upon a point that has been discussed before.

(https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Literature_Analysis/Stopping_by_Woods_on_a_Sno
wy_Evening)

2.6 STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF ROBERT FROST’S “STOPPING BY

WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING

In the poem, the speaker stops at a place near woods to watch the snow fall on an
evening. He seems uncertain about the place and its owner while his horse stands
confused and wants to know why his master has stopped at this lonely place. The
speaker stays quite absorbed in nature and fascinated towards woods. While he is
engrossed, the horse rings his bell to make him aware of his journey and
responsibilities he has to fulfill. At the end, he decides to move on. The narrative is
simple talking about the continuation of time and life. The mood of the poem is
speculative and the speaker reflects on life, death and nature. The setting is rural and
environment is peaceful. The element of doubt and ambiguity is evident; at one point
he is captivated to continue his reflection on woods while on other, he knows he has
to move on to fulfill his duties of life. The poet has presented a snowy night scene and
highlighted the speaker’s thoughts and feelings.

2.6.1 Graph-logical Category:

This lyrical poem is made up of four stanzas of four lines each. The poem contains the
rhyming scheme of AABA CCDC EEFE GGGG. The rhyme of every next stanza
follows the rhyme of the third line of the previous one like in second stanza the third
29
line ends at ‘here’ giving way to the rhyme of next stanza, similarly the word ‘lake’
for ‘shake’ and ‘sweep’ for ‘deep’ respectively. This rhyming scheme creates rhythm
and music in the poem. First and third stanzas contain two lines making a sentence
while second and fourth make one sentence. The poet has used punctuations marks
like comma, semi colon and full stop and mostly they are present at the end of the lines
to give pause or end the sentence.

2.6.2 Foregrounding:
Deviation and parallelism are the forms of foregrounding which show irregularity in
form. The poet had deviated from the normal rule of capitalization as the every first
word of each line is capitalized. There are repeated words like ‘I’, ‘think’ and ‘woods’
which highlight the speculative point of the point and the speaker’s attraction towards
woods. The last two lines are repeated which shows the emphasis on the poet’s
responsibilities and being a reminder to break his trance; they are in repetitive structure
and add musical quality. There is deviation in the structure of the first sentence as it
does not follow the normal pattern of subject and verb. The poet has used apostrophe
instead of ‘is’ to create a deviation in spelling.

2.6.3 Lexical Category

It is a personal poem with the use of simple and formal diction without any kind of
slang. The language is descriptive and evaluative as it describes the scene as well as
expresses the speaker’s ideas and feelings. Various parts of speech are incorporated
for semantic and syntactical purposes.

Action
Noun Pronoun Verb Adjective Adverb Preposition Conjunction

Woods I Think Little Here Up Though

House These Know Frozen Near In And

Village His See Darkest With If

Horse Whose Stopping Harness Without But

Queer He Watch Some Between Before

Farmhouse Me Fill Easy Of Whose

Lake My Stop Downy

Evening It Think Lovely

Year Gives Dark

Bells Ask Deep

Shake Keep

30
Mistake Go

Sound Sleep

Sweep

Wind

Flake

Promises

Miles

The nouns used are related to nature and human to create a connection between the
two as the speaker is there fascinated towards nature and speculating on it. Concrete
nouns highlight physical presence and natural imagery while abstract is employed to
hint about future. The verbs show speculation, movement and continuity as one is in
continuous tense while others are in present indefinite and infinitive to indicate his
present state and the compulsions he has. The title of the poem contains gerund
‘stopping’ in it to show the continuity of the speaker’s journey. Pronouns refer to place
and persons and draw attention to two personas of the poem, the speaker and his horse.
Adjectives describe nature and speaker’s perception enhancing the scene as well as
the woods. The two different words like lovely and dark are incorporated to describe
the two sides of woods and they present his two ways of looking at them. Adverbs and
prepositions show the place while co-ordinate and sub-ordinate conjunctions combine
different clauses to create coherence in the poem. The sentences are declarative and in
three forms like simple, compound and complex and the length of sentences depend
on the ideas they reflect. There are noun phrases, prepositional phrases and verb
phrases in the poem. Noun phrases are ‘my little horse’, the darkest evening’ and ‘only
other sound’. Prepositional phrases are ‘between the woods’ and ‘in the village. Verb
phrases are ‘I think’, ‘I know’, ‘will not see’, ‘stopping here’, ‘fill up’, ‘must think’
and ‘I have’ while infinitive phrases are ‘to watch’, ‘to stop’, ‘to ask’, ‘to keep’ and
‘to go’.

2.6.4 Figurative category

Figurative speech has functional and artistic purposes to create meaning and beauty in
the poem. Imagery is both visual and auditory like the natural scene and sound of bell
respectively. The whole poem is symbolic as it is reflection on life and the symbols
used are woods, snow, lake, sleep, village, bell and horse. Woods stand for complexity
of life, snow, lake and sleep for coldness and death, village for civilization, bell for
reminder and horse is the speaker’s other self. There are two kinds of feelings; one is
of attraction and other is reminder of responsibilities. There is personification in which
human qualities are attributed to the horse like think and ask. The
exaggeration/hyperbole is present in “the darkest evening of the year” and “The woods
fill up with snow”. The harness bell is a metaphor for the signal that the horse gives
to his master. By one person’s perspective and experience, the poet is exploring
31
something larger and central to human condition and this is synecdoche. The word
sleep is employed with denotative and connotative meanings as one meaning is to rest
but other indicates death. The poet uses onomatopoeia where the sound of wind is
sweep. The poem contains alliteration at different places like ‘whose woods these are’,
‘his house is in the village’ and ‘to watch his woods fill up with snow’. There are
consonance sounds of s, th and w and assonance sound of o. The last line gives the
idea of climax in which the poet returns to reality knowing that he has promises to
fulfil and reminds himself about his journey.
(https://readingpoesy.wordpress.com/2017/01/29/stylistic-analysis-of-robert-frosts-
stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening-nazneen-zahra/)

2.7 LET US SUM UP

The Stylistic analysis of the current poem, explores that poem is designed very
tactfully, where narrator stops on his way in woods to watch snow falling. Frost has
used a combination of different stylistic devices to make this poem a lyrical one.
Semantically, Frost used 108-word tokens and 74-word types. The difference in type
token ratio shows that certain words are repeated many times like “the” for 7 times to
make certain ideas and objects significant in the poem. “And” has been used for 5
times to express the abundance of thoughts in writer’s mind.

The atmosphere of poem seems very terrible, even horse is impatient to go from that
sight and shakes his harness bell. The whole of environment depicted in the poem,
creates a sense of dismay, despair and finally death. The poet has used 4 mental verbs
think, see, know, and watch and abstract material process verbs that something is going
on in narrator’s mind. After the comprehensive analysis of the poem, we may conclude
that it is dismay, despair, depression and anxiety that even horse is thinking it queer
but human has his promises to keep, which one has to fulfil even after all of this
depression and anxiety.

2.8 UNIT END QUESTIONS

1. Write a few lines on Robert Frost’s personal life, education and career.
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2. Elucidate Robert Frost’s conversational style.

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3. What does stanza-3 of the poem signify?

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33
UNIT-3 EMILY DICKINSON: “BECAUSE I COULD
NOT STOP FOR DEATH”

Structure

3.0 Objectives
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Early life and style of work of Dickinson
3.3 Because I Couldn’t Stop For Death… Text
3.4 Because I Couldn’t Stop For Death… Analysis
3.5 Let us sum up
3.6 Unit end questions

3.0 OBJECTIVES

After going through this unit, the learners will be able to:
 Learn about Emily Dickinson and her works.
 Analyse the style of the poem “Because I could not stop for death”.
 Learn about the poetic imagery used in the poem.

3.1 INTRODUCTION

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her
father, Edward Dickinson was a well-known lawyer in Amherst and even a trustee of
Amherst College. Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson was, a very timid women.
Now, although Dickinson’s family had some very close ties to the community,
Dickinson was a little different. In her teenage years, Dickinson had studied at a school
called Amherst Academy. Just two years before she attended, it was an all-boys
school. During her years there she studied classical literature, Latin, and even “mental
philosophy.” Because of this, Daniel Fiske, the school’s principal had explained her
as being, “very bright.” There were many times though, that Emily had to miss school
because of illness. At one point, she had only been enrolled into school for just 11
weeks. During her last couple years of schooling, Dickinson had become more distant
and off. She had always been a troubled girl, but the constant paranoia of possible
danger happening to her, pushed her to the edge. One of the main reasons why she
thinks this way is because of her cousin, Sophia Holland. Holland was her second
cousin and very good friend. She ended up becoming ill from typhus and died in April
1844. In her last semester at the Academy, she left for home.

When Dickinson was eighteen years old, her family became friends with a man named
Benjamin Franklin Newton. Newton was a young attorney and someone Dickinson
describes as “fatherly.” Although Dickinson and Newton were not romantic, Newton
had thought highly of him and considered him to be a tutor, preceptor, and even
34
master. It is thought that Newton had showed Dickinson writings of William
Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson. After reading her work, Newton thought very
highly of Dickinson. Later, Newton was dying of tuberculosis and wrote her, saying
“he would like to live until she achieved the greatness he foresaw.” After Newton had
passed, she had found out so did her principal Leonard Humphrey. Humphrey had died
of a brain congestion at age 25. By this time, Dickinson was withdrawing more and
more from the world. In the summer of 1858, she began to review, cleaning, and
copying all of her written work. When she was done, she had almost 800 poems.
However, no one was aware these poems had existed until after her death.

3.2 EARLY LIFE AND STYLE OF WORK OF DICKINSON

She spent her entire life in her parental household in Amherst. Her father Edward
Dickenson was a lawyer by profession. In her family she had her mother, Emily
Norcross Dickinson; her elder brother and her intellectual companion, Austin and her
youngest sister Lavinia. Her sister played a great part in protecting Emily from her
social obligations and also was the mind behind the publication of Dickinson’s poems
that she thought to be the works of a genius. Dickinson’s family was considered to be
one of the most prominent families in Amherst area. In her early days she enjoyed
both her family life and her social life; but by the time she reached in her thirties she
chose to stay apart from her social life. She was considered to be “the Myth” in her
hometown. But this seclusion of Dickenson was not for any disappointment she faced
in her life; it was a chosen one. For a long period of about fifteen years she carefully
maintained this recluse. There were many rumours about her seclusion but none had
affected her mental serenity. Dickinson, in her lifetime, has written more than
thousands of poems but she had never thought of making them available for public
reading. A sense of estrangement and alienation that was prominent in her personality
gets reflected through her writings. The most prominent imagery that is to be found in
her poetry is her portrayal of “Death”. Death for her was the drive that consciously
revolves her imagination. Apparently because of the frequent use of the word “Death”
in her poems, one could consider her to be a depressive poet but surprisingly in almost
all of her poems she innately questioned the truth of “Death”. In some of her writing
she visualised “Death” to be her kind companion and almost instantly imagined herself
to be in the lap of death; thus experiencing the dead person’s psychological dilemma.
She herself was a believer of afterlife and thereby she, in her poems, experiences a
continuous battle in her mind between faith in God and consciousness to death. There
was an unresolved dilemma that she faced in her life which was between her belief in
immortality and her undying faith in the existence of God.

Dickinson has focused in her life in “perspicacity” i.e. to look into the insight of things.
She conceptualises the term as a process of self-understanding that is only possible
when one tries to investigate about one’s identity internally. Dickinson belongs to the
realm of those artists who wanted to cherish their “alone-time” for exploring their own
self. She thought poetry to be a mode of private expressions that should not be shared
with and thus it was her earnest wish to destroy all her literary creations without
35
leaving behind any trace of it. So it is quite obvious that the question of her own
existence “who am i?” haunted her to an extreme level. The foundational philosopher
for this idea of perspicacity was Socrates who conveyed the message that “the
unexamined life is not worth living.” The reason behind this self-identification is the
purpose of one’s self-realization. To understand the nature of Dickinson’s poetry we
need to focus equally on the forms as well as on the content of the poems. In her poems
we can experience a kind of juxtaposition between form and content. If we make a
deeper study into her poetry then we can find her use of words having a duality of
meaning. For example in one of her poems she has used the word “hellish-heaven”
which is a kind of oxymoron as she is not meaning exactly the same thing that she is
referring to.

To certain extent Dickinson’s writing emerges out from the philosophical idea of
transcendentalism. The term transcendentalism has been interpreted variously.

“Transcendence” means “beyond” or “above”. So a ‘transcendentalist’ is a person who

ensures a faith in the divine world. The divine is referred to as “the over-soul”.

Transcendental philosophy believes in “oneness” with man, nature and God. They
have given stress on the worth of individual and ascribed a dignity to the human soul.
The Transcendentalists varies from that of the Unitarianism with their reliance upon
intuition.

They are of opinion that, the soul of an individual is very much identical with that of
the universal. Conrad Aiken has stated about Dickinson that, she was “the most perfect
flower of New England Transcendentalism.” Dickinson from her transcendentalist
point of view has observed the presence of the supreme creator in her slightest of hope.
Death for her is a matter of continuous mystery that she always wanted to resolve. She
observed death very closely in her life and considered it to be an inevitable part of
human life. But the fascinating thing about her writing is her intuition. Her curiosity
for knowing death’s reality binds her mind to feel death even more closely though
being alive. She was a firm believer of soul’s permanence after death. This concept of
the immortality of soul validates her notion with the thought of becoming one with the
“over-soul”.

3.3 BECAUSE I COULDN’T STOP FOR DEATH… TEXT

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
36
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –

3.4 BECAUSE I COULDN’T STOP FOR DEATH… ANALYSIS

“Because I couldn’t stop for Death” is a poem published in the year 1890. It is a
descriptive poem with vivid imagery representing the journey from home to
graveyard. But the imagery that has been used by Dickinson is morbid and sumptuous.
Dickinson is not a depressive poet rather she is an investigative one. She is asking an
interesting question on death. Her purpose is to disclose the innate experience of being
dead. Now the question that arises is that how is it possible for a person to experience
death like this? Her answer to this is that she herself is experiencing death in her inner
vision. Here she visualises death not as a terror but as a lover. Dickinson is the believer
of afterlife and here she is playing with her visionary. To analyse this poem we have
to focus on both the form and content. While discussing about the form the first thing
that strikes in our mind is Dickinson’s use of punctuation marks. The most prominent
punctuation mark is her frequent use of dashes (—).

Now the striking point is why she has used these dashes in the middle of her writing.
The probable answer is that she wanted to give a pause in the sense as the poem is
speaking of a situation related to death. It breaks the rhythm of the poem. The dash is
therefore signifying a stop. It is like an end of breathing. It also represents a kind of
dilemma as she is also in a confusion of the fact that what is going to happen next.
And she is not sure of what exactly happens with a person when he is dead. She wanted
to experience that feeling of dying through her vision. When she is saying that “I

37
couldn’t stop for death” it means that she didn’t want to die rather her wish was
completion.

“Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just ourselves—
And Immortality.”

She imagines a chariot driven by death as its driver, so death is personified here.
Everything about Dickinson is so precise. She is using the word “kindly” to
characterise death. Her use of adverb adds a positive attribute to the workings of death.
It is very unique and also very much surprising to characterise death as a kind persona
which has always been considered as a tyrant.

We slowly drove—He knew no haste

And I had put away
My labour and my leisure too,
For His Civility—

In this stanza she explains the “motion” of the carriage in which she is a passenger.
This “motion” or “speed” is synonymous with the thought of timelessness. The
carriage is being slowly driven by death so that she will comfortably finish her final
journey. This carriage is metaphorically associated with a carriage carrying dead
bodies. Now most astonishingly she considers herself to be the rider of such a carriage
and she is having “immortality” as her co-passenger.

This fact is being emphasised with her use of the word “and” in the fourth line of the
first stanza. The ease, the comfort that she is experiencing being dead symbolises the
futility of hurriedness. The term “leisure” is very essential factor as it provides a kind
of juxtaposition with the concept of death. The juxtaposition lies in the fact that if a
person is alive then only the thought of "leisure” comes into effectiveness. But as she
is implementing the concept of a dead person then leisure bears no significance at all.
Death is here personified with grandeur and the speaker is captivated with his charm.
In most of Dickinson’s poem death carries the message of terror. But it seems like she
is mesmerised with the charm of death. During this period of journey she is portraying
some images like “school”, “gazing grain”, “setting sun” etc. all these are images
taking forward its reader to the stages of maturity.

We passed the School, Where Children strove

At Recess— in the Ring—
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—

Dickinson is providing a vivid image about a journey. She is describing the outside
scenario of the nature from the window of her carriage. She is starting with the School

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where the children’s are playing ignorantly. This ignorance that she is referring about
is the childish innocence of a starting period of life. Then she proceeds toward the
gazing grains. This term “Grain” signifies the idea of maturity. The next scene that she
is observing is the image of the “Setting Sun”. This is a cliché referring to the end of
life. So with these images it is quite obvious that she is describing the different stages
of human life starting from innocence to maturity. The speaker is visualising or we
can say that she is recapitulating the events of her life during her final journey. The
“immortality” that she is referring to is the immortality of soul. In the next stanza she
is concentrating on an image of a “House”. This “House” refers to a graveyard. In this
stanza she is clarifying the purpose of her journey as she reaches a house.

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground

She is imagining a typical Christian graveyard. The “Swelling Ground” referred to

here is the burial place prepared for her. The interesting thing is that she has chosen a
complete alienation from the society for almost fifteen years so it is quite possible that
she is writing this poem sitting at her room. The journey that she is completing stops
at the gate of another house. Perhaps we can assume this journey as her final one. She
is making the conclusion in the last stanza by saying that:

Since then—‘tis Centuries—and yet

Feel, shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity—

3.5 LET US SUM UP

Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death” reflects on the journey and reality
of death through the personification of Death and Immortality and the simple act of
going on a carriage ride. Many commentators have had their own takes on the poem,
from comedic, to Freudian, however, the fact still remains that the poem is a greatly
important one, and helps shape our understanding of Dickinson herself.

3.6 UNIT END QUESTIONS

1. Write a few lines on Emily Dickinson and her life as a poet.

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2. Explain ‘Transcendentalism’. How is it witnessed in Dickinson’s

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3. What is Dickinson’s idea of God, as portrayed in her works?

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4. Critically appreciate the poem “Because I couldn’t stop for death”.

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UNIT-4 MAYA ANGELOU: “I KNOW WHY THE
CAGED BIRDS SING”

Structure

4.0 Objectives
4.1 Introduction
4.2 About the poet: Maya Angelou
4.3 “I Know Why The Caged Birds Sing”: The Text
4.4 Significance Of The Expression “Caged Bird”
4.5 Value Distortion
4.6 Resurrection of The Black Self
4.7 Celebration Of Black Identity
4.8 Let us sum up
4.9 Unit end questions

4.0 OBJECTIVES

After going through this unit, the learners will be able to:
 Learn about Maya Angelou and her works.
 Learn about the imagery and symbols that “caged bird” tries to poetry.
 Analyse the historical aspects of the poem ‘I know why the caged birds sing”.

4.1 INTRODUCTION

Despite her popular and critical acclaim garnered by her autobiographies, Maya
Angelou’s poetry has been understudied, even after her recitation of “On the Pulse of
Morning” in 1993 (DeGout, 2009, p.122). However, many of Angelou’s readers still
identify her as a poet first and an auto biographer second (Lupton, 1998, p.17).
Reviewer Elsie B. Washington (2002) has called her “the black woman’s poet
laureate”, and has called Angelou’s poetry “the anthems of African Americans” (p.56).
In spite of the negative and positive reviews, as an African American memoirist and
poet, Maya Angelou distinguishes herself by infusing her art with consistent cultural
consciousness. Following in the tradition like Hughes who creates a new African
American identity, a proud sense of self in his poetry, Angelou speaks out the survival,
development, and actualization of African- American people confronted by the Anglo-
American cultural hegemony with the best of words she can summon.

In this paper, the author proposes to analyse Maya Angelou’s poetry with particular
emphasis on the theme of self-actualization permeating her poetry. It can be explored
in two respective aspects. First, she exposes African-Americans’ cultural identity
issues by depicting their lives and experience. After being taken to America by slave
traders, the Africans were forced to separate from their mother culture and identify
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with the new culture. As a result, their cultural identity was threatened and their self
was distorted. With the emancipation of black slaves, African Americans were
gradually entitled to civil rights. Nevertheless, African Americans were still driven out
of the mainstream society with their own culture marginalized. Second, with a view to
recover. African Americans’ self-consciousness, Angelou stresses the importance of
affirming African American identity. In her poetry, she passionately depicts the New
African Americans; images of self-actualized African Americans and the “black”
metaphor work together to redefine African American culture. In the multicultural
society, Angelou explores the self-consciousness of African Americans, identifies her
people with the unique African-American culture, and keeps alive ethnic culture.

4.2 ABOUT THE POET: MAYA ANGELOU

Maya Angelou (1928-2014), an African American memoirist and poet, is best known
for her autobiographic novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and her long poem
“On the Pulse of Morning” which she was invited to read at the inauguration of
President Bill Clinton in 1993. As a contemporary black female writer, she
distinguishes herself by infusing her art with consistent cultural consciousness,
personal and cultural experience. Her poetry reveals themes of survival, development
and self-discovery of African Americans. Knowing the destructive effects the
hegemonic culture—White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture has exerted on
African Americans, Angelou deeply feels the need to undermine the binary opposition
of the dominant and subaltern cultures and reconstruct the cultural order. Therefore,
the aim of this paper is to explore the theme of self-actualization of African Americans
in her poetry. By redefining blackness and eulogizing the self-accepted black people,
Angelou encourages African Americans to inherit their African cultural heritage and
affirm their black identity. It concludes that her work manages to awaken African
American’s self-consciousness by encouraging them to preserve and celebrate their
black culture.

4.3 “I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRDS SING”: The Text

A free bird leaps

on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks

down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage

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his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze

and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams

his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

4.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE EXPRESSION “CAGED BIRD”

In Angelou’s poem “Africa”, she presents a rather vivid picture of the colonizing
process of Africa. In the poem, the colonized Africa is seen as a mother robbed of her
children, injured by merciless “brigands” and left helpless and depressed. Using the
scene of inhumane robbery, Angelou exposes the unforgivable crimes committed by
the western colonizers: they “took her young daughters / sold her strong sons”
(Angelou, 1994, p.84). Once they arrived in this foreign land, the ex-Africans were
deprived of chances to contact their root culture and had to struggle to survive in the
world where they were relegated to inferior positions. The bitterness of being treated
unfairly is clearly depicted with a satirical tone in “When I Think About Myself”: “The
tales they tell sound like lying / they grow the fruit / But eat the rind” (Angelou, 1994,
p.29). “Song for the Old Ones” deals with “the painful anguish suffered by blacks
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forced into submission, with guilt over accepting too much, and with protest and basic
survival” (Neubauer, 1990, p.4). Similarly, Paul Dunbar (1984) reveals that the
Africans survive in the hostile environment of the American plantation by “wearing
the mask” (p.167). In the days of “whip and lash and stock” (Angelou, 1994, p.107),
as described in this poem, to some extent, to survive means to make submission: “they
say ‘It’s our submission / that makes the world go round’” (p.107).

Characters in the poem “Song for the Old Ones” are people passively “fulfill” the
internalization and accept their “inferiority” without resistance. In contrast, the
character in “Caged Bird” displays a strong desire to break through the fences of racial
oppression. African Americans in this poem are compared to be “Caged Bird”, while
their repressed ethnic culture is symbolized by the “clipped wings.” In fact, their
culture and customs are more or less wiped out because these are in conflict with the
dominant culture that is imposed on them. Confronted with the compulsion of Anglo-
American norm and the loss of African culture, the ex-Africans have to bear the pain
of losing cultural identity: “his wings are clipped and / his feet are tied” (Angelou,
1994, p.194). The “caged bird” desires to be free, it “sings / with a fearful thrill”;
African Americans desire to break away from the obscure identity and realize their
true self: “…the caged bird / sings of freedom”.

4.5 VALUE DISTORTION

Exposing the hypocrisy of the white dominating ideology is one of Angelou’s tasks.
In the white-centered society, African Americans cannot avoid being influenced by
the dominant white cultural values that define the white as good and beautiful and the
black as sinful and ugly. As Gutman (1977) once said, “African-Americans always
find that they are in possession of a zero image which results from their sense of
worthlessness” (p.534).

And it is also this “zero image” that threatens African Americans in further realizing
their self-value and fulfilling their personhood. To reveal the deceiving alien value,
Angelou displays the truth in her poem “Kin”: “You fought to die, thinking in
destruction lies the seed / of birth…” (Angelou, 1994, p.158). As in “Saviour,”
Angelou expresses the complex feeling of the blacks who were confused by their
marginal identity: “Your children, burdened with / Disbelief, blinded by a patina / of
wisdom” (Angelou, 1994, p.250). In the closing part, the poet expresses her utmost
satire of the distorted value of the whites’: “We cry for you / although we have lost /
your name” (p.250). In “Just

Like Job”, Angelou bitterly satirizes the false ideals. During the slavery period the
blacks contributed remarkably to the alien land while they were subdued to the lowest
living condition: “When my blanket was nothing but dew. Rags and bones / were all I
owned” (Angelou, 1994, p.172). They desired to obtain a fair status in the country
where they had sacrificed their lives: “My life give I gladly to Thee / Deep rivers ahead
/ High mountains above” nevertheless, the white culture did not provide such position
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for them, so they were puzzled and afraid: “But fears gather round like wolves in the
dark. / have you forgotten my name?” When the slaves were set free, they were
inspired by the Constitution. However, they were never able to fulfil their aspiration.
Instead, most of them had to live in the ghettos and were still confronted with poverty,
racial discrimination and unemployment. The schoolyard chant “Harlem Hopscotch”
reflects this truth: “Since you black, don’t stick around. / Food is gone, the rent is due,
/ Curse and cry and then jump two” (Angelou, 1994, p.51). The inalienable rights to
pursue happiness, equality and wealth that are entitled to “every American” seem to
be never fulfilled in their lives. Therefore, to African Americans, to be fully integrated
into the white mainstream society is nothing short of an illusion.

4.6 RESURRECTION OF THE BLACK SELF

DuBois (1994) views the history of the American Negro is the history of “this longing
to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self”
(p.191). For DuBois, the discovery of self-consciousness is “a kind of awakening, the
emergence of a repressed truth from the recesses of oppressive cultural systems”
(Gikandi, 2005). Angelou also shows deep interest in strengthening African
Americans’ cultural identity by devoting herself to the recovery of the black self.
Therefore, affirming and celebrating black identity play a crucial role in Angelou’s
works. The effort to restore the black self, as shown in Angelou’s poetry, involves
cultural practice of recasting black identity and redefining blackness. The source for
black self-definition, Angelou believes, is the union of Black pride and African
American culture. Thus, she devotes herself to educating and affirming the positive
meaning of blackness.

4.7 CELEBRATION OF BLACK IDENTITY

On arrival on the alien land, the ex-Africans lost every touch with their ancestors as
well as their root culture. Their original names—real names—were one of the few
links to the culture of their motherland. In some sense, their African names stood for
their cultural identity, representing their collective self or their images reflected in the
society. At first, the white dominators changed the ex-Africans’ names for their own
convenience. Gradually, the dominators imposed various insulting names upon the
dominated ex-Africans so as to debase them and the acceptance of these names
symbolizes the conformation to the white dominant culture and the recognition of zero
images. Indeed, the state of their names can truly reflect their images. African
Americans lacking (proper) names appear in such poems as “Our Grandmothers”,
“Request” and “When I Think About Myself”. The names given by the white
oppressors in “Our Grandmothers” reveal the fact that African Americans were once
reduced to animals; they were once called “nigger, nigger bitch, heifer, / mammy,
property, creature, ape, baboon, / whore, hot tail, thing, it” (Angelou, 1994, p.256).
Instead of accepting the names passively, characters in “Request” resist the zero
images. In the poem, Angelou ironically views African Americans as a young

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“bastard” discarded without a status. Similar to the child depicted in the poem who
suffered from a lack of legal status,

African Americans feel great pain with their abnormal identity and bear their zero
images. In this case, Angelou speaks out the collective quest of African Americans for
positive cultural identities: “Give a legal name to beg from / for the first / time of its
life” (Angelou, 1994, p. 83). In “The Calling of Names” and “Our Grandmothers”, the
act of self-entitlement is completely demonstrated. In “The Calling of Names”,
political identity of African Americans changes with their names from “African,
coloured, and Negro to Black” (Angelou, 1994, p.46). The poem shows that during
the slavery period, African- Americans could not be treated as a normal human being:
“He went to being called a coloured man / after answering to ‘hey, nigger’” (p.46).
However, with their racial awakening, they obtain their new social status: “From
coloured man to Negro / With the N in caps” (p.46). This procedure is a “big step” for
the liberation of African Americans, and the change in names is a change for true.
The process of renewing identity reached its peak when African Americans replaced
the insulting “niggers” with the new identity “Black”. During the “Black Power
Movement”, “Blackness” is put forward and emphasized. Adhering to Blackness in
white culture is to sabotage the dominant cultural system and redefine a new one. Here,
Angelou replaces the bitterness that once ran through African Americans’ lives with
wrath. What is reflected is a sense of power instead of a sense of frustration. This is
shown in “The Calling of Names”: “Now you’ll get hurt if you don’t call him “Black””
(Angelou, 1994, p.46).

To heighten her people’s awareness of their black identity, Angelou depicts groups of
new Black people who are completely different from the stereotypical “Uncle-Toms”
in her poetry. These characters demonstrate that the once debased black identity now
becomes dignified, the once weak self-awareness now strengthened, and the once
negative self-image now positive. Angelou produces a series of poems such as “One
More Round,” “Weekend Glory” and “Times-Square-Shoeshine-Composition.” In
these poems, Angelou portrays several working-class African Americans who
willingly accept their black identity and revise the once zero images for themselves.
What Angelou achieves by doing this is to bring about the spontaneous redefinition of
the black individual, not as an alienated, but as a new and whole person who occupies
a totally different social space. “Weekend Glory” fatherly presents an African
American woman taking pride in being black and positive about her self-image: “If
they want to learn how to live life right, / they ought to study me on Saturday
night”(Angelou, 1994, p.206). On weekend, those workers would “Then get spruced
up / and laugh and dance” (p.206) because they are assured that they equally have the
right to enjoy life just as the whites. This character is fully aware that it is her black
identity that provides cultural strength as well as resourcefulness. And the cultural
strength permits a reversal of domination and transforms what was once perceived by
the white as inferior and weak race image. Angelou demonstrates her deep concern by
depicting African American bourgeoisie in the face of the white homogenizing culture.
In order to achieve the elevation of status within the white dominant culture, some of

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the African American middle class choose to accept the white values, giving up their
conventional black ideology.

In “Sepia Fashion Show”, Angelou portrays the typical African American bourgeoisie
who are busy climbing the social ladders to achieve social advancement at the price
of the African American cultural heritage that had once filled their life. In order to be
involved in the white culture, they deviate from their mother culture: “The Black
Bourgeois, who all say “yah” / when yeah what they’re meaning is” (Angelou, 1994,
p.48). As implied in the poem, their social status remains inferior to the white. And
the only price for participating in the order of the white is the loss of black individuality
and the adherence to social conformity. Tragically, while African-American
bourgeoisie in the poem strive to be absorbed into the larger ambit of the white culture,
they fail to realize the fact that the white mainstream society will still exclude them
instead of fully accepting them. They seem to refuse to understand that within the
white-dominated society, they could not be as absolutely equal as the white
bourgeoisie and participate in their social circles. Obviously, by comparing the self-
denied bourgeoisie with the self-accepted working-class African Americans, Angelou
extols the new blacks who take positive attitude toward their black identity, stick to
black consciousness and resist the dominant ideology.

(http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ells/article/view/35877)

4.8 LET US SUM UP

Realizing the devastating impact the dominant culture exerts on the development of
marginal groups, Angelou devotes herself to advocating a healthier cultural context.
In her poetry, she retreats back to the oppressive memories that generations of African
Americans have ever had. For African Americans, maintaining their African culture
enables them to survive in an alien world. To recover her people’s self-consciousness
and restore their identity, Angelou makes great efforts to redefine blackness. By
assimilating themselves with their ancestor’s culture, they are able to renew their self
and truly know themselves. In doing so, she keeps alive ethnic culture and leads
African Americans out of the margin. Therefore, Maya Angelou is a cultural poet who
fulfils the task of transmitting cultures.

4.9 UNIT END QUESTIONS

1. How the imagery of “caged birds” drawn in this poem?

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2. Write a few lines about Maya Angelou, her life and her work(s).
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3. How is the poem related to Black life and Black community?

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4. Write a few lines on the”Resurrection of Black lives”.

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