Oh! Hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,
And black are the waters that sparkled so green.
The moon, o’er the combers, looks downward to find us,
At rest in the hollows that rustle between.
Where billow meets billow, then soft be thy pillow,
Oh weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!
The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,
Asleep in the arms of the slow swinging seas!
When I was small (and not so small) my father read to us. By “us” I mean all my siblings together. He read Canticle for Liebowitz, and early Heinlein space operas, and books of Pogo cartoons. When reading the latter my father would position himself in the middle of the living room floor, or on my parents’ big bed, and we would arrange ourselves like rays around the book, our sun. We all wanted to be able to see the pictures, and there was not a little sibling rivalry as we vied for position. The other, non-illustrated, books were easier. Sometimes at night my father would sit in the hallway under the light, in front of the open doors to our bedrooms. He would read loudly, and we would hold very still in our beds, straining to hear his voice in the dark. There were more and more children as the years went by, eleven all told by the end. A miscarriage, the only one my mother ever had, robbed us of the coveted twelth sibling, whom we still mourn.
One of the books my father read us was The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling, although there were some stories he skipped over, considering them too ruthlessly Darwinian for small children. One of our favorites was “The White Seal,” the story of the albino seal messiah Kotick, who saves his kind from the slaughtering fur traders by finding them a beach completely inaccessible to man on which they could live. The story begins with the “Seal Lullaby,” which quickly became one of my favorite poems. In junior high, when I began to copy poems I loved into the back of my journals, it was one of the first poems I copied.
I think that part of the poem’s appeal is its strong rhythmic quality. The lines have deep ebbs and flows that make you feel the waves of the ocean. The words that Kipling chooses also sound like water, with lots of “s” and “st” sounds. A good example is “slow swinging seas” in the last line. He also uses a lot of words with “o” vowel sounds: “The moon, o’er the combers looks downward…” This helps you to not only feel, but hear the ocean setting.
The poem has an affectionate, dreamlike quality particularly suited to a lullaby. Kipling uses the archaic familiar “thee” throughout, a convention he often uses in his work when animals speak. This sometimes indicated increased formality, but also implies that he is translating from another language (in this case seal language), which has retained the familiar which modern English has lost. The use of the familiar contributes to the sweet tone of the poem, helping the reader feel the deep love and care between a mother and her baby. All mothers are the same, Kipling seems to say, whether they rock their babies to sleep in wooden rockers or between ocean waves. In this way the poem is reminiscent of the “Baby Mine” number in Disney’s Dumbo. This contributes to the emotional impact of the story as we later witness through Kotick’s eyes the slaughter of those babies by the fur harvesters.
This poem is a small gem of its kind. Although Kipling can be trite or cliched, I thinkhis poetic skills are underappreciated. This poem is beautiful, memorable, and finely crafted. I would not mind singing it one day to my own children.
Eric Whitacre made this lovely poem into a song. It’s absolutely brilliant, I think.
You can listen to it on his myspace, which is http://www.myspace.com/ericwhitacre, or in his blog, found here: http://ericwhitacre.wordpress.com/2008/06/01/the-seal-lullaby-with-recording/
I am singing this song in my highschool choir. the other day we were talking about the meaning of this song and I had no idea what it meant, this website really gave me a better view on what it should mean to me and how I should personally feel, thanks so much!
Thanks so much for the insight…
Our chamber choir is also singing this song. For a grade we have to write a paper on a song each quarter, and i chose this song. This really helped me understand the song better. 🙂
I have heard this being sung and it is one of the most beautiful and simple pieces I have ever heard….Thankyou to Eric Whitacre…..
Hi there,
we are singing the seal lullaby with our choir here in Vienna, Austria and struggling to understand the text. Can anyone help..
flipperling …is this a baby seal?
and which hollows are they at rest in?
is billow also part of a wave or is it a sound?
We really are not sure where the mother and baby seal are ..on the shore or in the water?
Thanks for your help out there.
Flipperling is a term of endearment that the mother is using to refer to her baby. Also, I believe that the hollows they’re at rest in are the hollows in between the waves at sea. Billow is another name for a wave, and I’ve always understood that the mother and baby are floating in the water while she sings the lullaby.
I see this song as a mother seal looking in on her sleeping pup (much the way any parent looks in on their sleeping child), and softly sings this sweet lullaby, while the reader (or listener of Eric Whitacre’s beautiful setting) envisions the trials and adventures of her little baby, through these picturesque and poetic words.
I can’t understand what he meant by “weary wee ” ???
Both weary and wee are adjectives describing the baby seal. Weary means that it is tired, and wee means that it is small.
We just sang this at out spring concert, and it was a crowd favorite. It’s my favorite, too.
Our choir director described this to us that we are the waves; the “oohs” are individual waves, and each starts softly, gets a little louder, then softer again. The mother and baby seal are floating on the waves, and the mother is rocking her baby and singing this calming lullaby with the rhythm of the waves. It’s amazing, because if you’ve ever rocked a baby to sleep, this is the rhythm your body naturally falls into.
weary=tired
wee=little
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I’m almost 60 yrs old now. The only thing I have of my grandfather are the 2 vol.s of the Jungle Books….1st ad. 1886
Kipling’s poem “Seal Lullaby” is full of tears…..the greatest poem in the English language