Lullaby and Mother Tongue: Poetic Performance and the Hebrew Lullaby

What is the role of form-making in the reception of the lullaby? How does the cradlesong radicalize the lyric’s tension between the drive to approximate the earliest syllable preceding speech and its verbal transmission to a historicized reader? This article traces the shapings of mother tongue(s) in the lullaby and accounts for this form’s roles in culture through three stages: (1) a Babylonian (Akkadian) babyincantation that exemplifies the infiltration of magic poetry into written speech; (2) Dahlia Ravikovitch’s keening “Lullaby” (1986), in which the lullaby is reframed as a dense rhythmic phonic pattern, thereby engaging the reader in constructing a historical memory site to which she or he becomes the witness; and (3) Avot Yeshurun’s “Your Face to My Face” (1991), an entombment poem that radicalizes the lullaby’s potential by distilling its core address to an other. Each of these instances, in which the intimate relational structure of the lullaby is mediated through sound and rhythm patterns, engages us in an active mode of poetic attention (“listening”), while emphasizing different aspects of the act of readership. Although a fuller historical review is beyond the scope of this essay, my contention is not only that the lullaby may be read as a poem on the very possibility of poetry but that this minor form has played a significant part in shaping modern Hebrew (Jewish-Israeli) poetry.