Once Paumanok,

When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing…

from Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking (pg. 1369)

The footnote details ‘Paumanok’ as Long Island. The name was given to the place by Native Americans who originally inhabited it, translated to “The Island That Pays Tribute”, according to Wikipedia.

Walt Whitman was born in May.

At this point I realized he’s writing about his younger self. Out of all of his poems we’ve read so far, I think this one may be the one with the most fantastical elements, which is quite fitting for a Walt Whitman origin story.

It’s interesting, the way he reminisces on his memories and tells a story out of it, like a grown adult’s mind peering through the eyes of a child. I think as he was writing this, he still remembered how it felt to be a kid, and so mingled aspects of childlike innocence, particularly the imagination of the bird’s aria, with darker thoughts (death) that come with maturity and the process of thinking as a poet.

I find it also chilling how Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking transitions quite well into Vigil Strange I Kept on The Field one Night, going from from a child’s first encounter with death to a man in the Civil War witnessing soldiers’ deaths. The two poems share a theme of keeping guard on one’s surroundings, with young Whitman observing the sea and the bird, and the Civil War Whitman keeping watch in the night.