Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Whitman’s vision in the poem rests on embracing the (im)perfect in all things. However, a baffling yet persistent dilemma confronts the speaker as he stares at the vacant faces on the ferry: No one else seems willing or able to connect with the speaker by embracing this spiritual vision.

Whitman, given his faith in the democratic gospel of union, embraced poetry as an intimacy with the reader that defied time and space. Here, he uses sweeping lines of stately and uncomplicated emphasis (often set in the invitatory imperative) to reach out to the reader to upend their quiet complacency, to get them swept up even for a moment in the clarion energy of language itself: “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence” (Line 21)—so says Whitman in this grand celebration of hundreds of commuters packed on the ferry crossing from Manhattan to Brooklyn. The speaker finds himself surrounded by city workers who grind out their lives in soul-crushing routine. They therefore appear dulled to the prospect of spiritual revival.

The river, with its powerful current and its unstoppable eddies, symbolizes the grandeur of the moment. The river becomes Whitman’s grand metaphor for the journey of life itself and the opportunity at every moment to take in the “glories strung like beads on [his] smallest sights and hearings” (Line 9). Whitman feels an intuitive bond to those metaphoric river crossers all around him, as well as to the earlier generations of ferry passengers and those passengers of generations to come, an expansive energy that includes the reader. It is a triumphant moment of choral union—for Whitman, that soul-deadening commute explodes into an expansive vision that triumphantly defies time, dismisses death as a sorry hobgoblin, and, in Stanza 9’s closing chorus, catapults the willing reader into nothing less than eternity itself.

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” begins quietly—the speaker, himself crowded among the nameless, faceless commuters, happens to peer over the railing of the ferry into the river and sees his own reflection bedazzled by radiant centrifugal spokes of light from the setting sun. It is a dazzling, unexpected reminder of the self-canonization that belongs not only to those present on the ferry deck but also to those in the past and future—if only they would open their eyes wide. The surrounding scenery is filled with invitations: “These [invitations] and all else were to me the same as they are to you” (Line 49), says the speaker. These invitations carry consequence only when generation to generation, the speaker argues, we see them dazzle.

Whitman returns to the joy of imperfections in Stanza 6. The stanza catalogs the darker impulses, the animal energies in everyone—the wolf of lust, the snake of envy, the hog of gluttony—in a sweeping gesture of inclusiveness. For Whitman, these darker impulses are part of us. Emboldened by this confederacy, Whitman pulls nearer and underscores this dark connection: “What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks at my face?” (Line 96).

Whitman now launches into a sweeping centrifugal expansion. Stanza 9 indeed stirs, leaps, and then explodes into Whitman’s grand chorus—Flow on, river, the speaker sings out, in a sweeping cadence of building imperatives, verbs that command the physical world itself to affirm its own spiritual dimension. For the first time in the poem, Whitman thunders into the imperial first-person plural—we: “[W]e fathom you not” (Line 130), the speaker says, but we love the world as perfection-enough. Whitman then moves to his ringing peroration: “You furnish your parts toward eternity / Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul” (Lines 131-32). The “you” (Line 131) refers to the earth, commuters, and readers. Each, Whitman celebrates, can be catapulted into the eternal, into a radiant moment of Transcendental dazzle.