Rock-a-bye Baby

Rock-a-bye Baby is a recurring lullaby in E. L. Doctorow's City of God, and it carries far more weight than its simple nursery-rhyme surface suggests. Within the novel's sprawling meditation on faith, memory, and the nature of song, this children's tune becomes the central figure for the origins of music itself, the terror embedded in the most tender human gestures, and the theological concept of the Fall. The lullaby appears in the narrator's speculative account of the first songs ever sung, and its violent imagery of a cradle falling from a treetop is used to articulate the novel's conviction that every feeling contains its opposite, and that the act of being born is itself a kind of catastrophe. In this way, a song meant to soothe a baby to sleep becomes one of the book's most profound statements about the human condition.