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Crossing Brooklyn Ferry






(1856)

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is one of Whitman’s most powerful and successful poems, one that offers a good introduction to his themes and strategies. Many readers believe that Whitman was most successful in his midlength poems, for these have a coherence in theme, imagery, and rhythmic development that the endlessly unfolding, spontaneous, and fluid “Song of Myself” sometimes lacks. This poem first appeared in the second edition of Leaves of Grass and was one of Thoreau’s favorites, along with “Song of Myself.”

Here the poet is crossing the ferry of the East River at sundown, moving between New York City and Brooklyn. He leans on the rail above the water, noticing the people on deck, the water and gulls, the ships on the water and at anchor, and the colorful sunset. Awed by the sights and feeling affectionate toward the people on the ferry, he considers the relationship of these persons and things to him and to the Self and the soul. He turns to the reader and affirms that he or she 100 years or more afterward may see these same sights just as he saw them. Out of these observations emerges a meditation on themes of time and eternity, unity and identity, standing still and moving with time, and the relationship between poet and reader. Until the very end, the tone remains uniformly serene and meditative, unlike the ecstasies and barbaric yawps of “Song of Myself.” The poem is also one of Whitman’s most consistently visual, painterly, and aesthetically nuanced poems.

At the start of the poem, the poet silently and affectionately says to the strangers on the ferry, “How curious you are to me! ”. And from the passengers, he turns to his readers and says, “It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not, / I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence”. Speaking directly to the reader, he creates the sense of a living voice, one that will be heard as long as someone opens his book. His words speak across time and space. They also seem uncannily to issue from beyond the grave, being voiced in the past tense: “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt. / Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd”.

He tells how he “look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water”, an image that makes him and everyone haloed, holy, godlike. Having created a voice that unites poet and reader across time and space, he then inquires about the nature of that which separates them. “What is it then between us? / What is the count of the scores of hundreds of years between us? / Whatever it is, it avails not”.

In section 6 he draws closer to the reader, acknowledging that he, too, experienced failures, losses, and shame. And in section 7 he says, “Closer yet I approach you, / What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you... / I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born. /... / Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now for all you cannot see me? ”. With this loving, godlike, ghostly voice, he now asks about the nature of that which connects him to the reader: What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face? Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you? We understand then do we not? What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted? What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not?

In his preface to the 1855 Leaves, Whitman asserted that the message of the new American poet must be “ indirect and not direct” (emphasis added). Here is one of the slyest, boldest instances of his indirection. He never says what it is that ties the woman or man to him, that connects him to the reader, that he promised without mentioning, and that we have accepted. What the study teaches is knowledge. What preaching seeks to accomplish is the listener’s salvation. From section 5 of “Song of Myself” we know that “a kelson of the creation is love” and that the poet at that moment gained a “peace and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth.” The voice here seems to be working to create a relationship with the reader out of which love and knowledge and salvation, of some indefi nite kind, will ensue.

Having reached the heart of the matter (without ever actually revealing what it is), in section 9 he returns attention to the ferry in celebratory, even ecstatic tones: “Flow on, river! flow with the floodtide, and ebb with the ebb-tide! ”. Then the poem closes with one of Whitman’s most profound meditations. He concludes that all these sights are simply “appearances, ” a “necessary film” that “envelop[es] the soul”. They are “dumb, beautiful ministers”.

We fathom you not—we love you—

there is perfection in you also,

You furnish your parts toward eternity,

Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

Thus although Whitman everywhere celebrates the body and the material, physical world, in the final analysis, at least in this poem, these material things are seen to be “appearances” that “envelope, ” and furnish their part, to the soul.

 






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