“Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death, And again death, death, death, death”
— Walt Whitman, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking (1859)
Context
Whitman's 1859 sea-elegy watches a boy on the Paumanok shore overhear a mockingbird mourning its vanished mate, an experience that wakes him to poetry, love, and loss. In the closing movement the grown poet demands of the sea the 'word final, superior to all,' and the sea answers by lisping a single word over and over until it laves him 'softly all over.'
How the repetition works
The catalogue already holds Lear's five-fold 'Never, never, never, never, never!' — identical repetition marshalled to refuse death. Whitman's sea repeats its one word to the opposite end: where Lear's iterations bar an unbearable fact, the sea's 'death, death, death, death' is a lullaby, each soft reiteration reconciling the boy to mortality rather than denying it. The same strict figure — one word, adjacently repeated, nothing intervening — can thus build either a wall against death or a cradle-song that welcomes it, decided only by the tone the surrounding lines lend the identical sound.