Whitman’s poem describes what he sees on a ferry crossing between Brooklyn to Manhattan. But the poem uses this landscape as a way of imaginatively casting himself into the future. Whitman’s description of his trip is addressed to “you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence”; there is something about the specificity of his experience, as captured in this poem, that enables him to directly address a future reader.
The things Whitman sees, of course, are the day-to-day workings of ships on the river; he sees the “Twelfth-month sea-gulls... oscillating their bodies”; he sees himself reflected in the water below, and “Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water”; he also sees the people aboard their passing boats, the “sailors at work in the rigging” or the steamer pilots “in their pilot-houses,” and then, the “gray walls of the granite storehouses by the docks,” or, on shore, “the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night.” Whitman does not present these details in a romanticized way. His point is that they don’t need to be romanticized—to be alive in the world is enough. As he says, addressing his future reader across the centuries,
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?
Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is a poem that exemplifies Whitman's abilities as a leading proponent of the transcendentalism literary movement. The poem depicts a thoughtful narrator taking the Brooklyn ferry home. He absorbs the entire scene, and early in the poem he has an uncanny sense in his observations of the throng of humanity taking the ferry:
Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! (1057)
In this everyday scene, the narrator has a transcendent moment in which he realizes that this same ferry will host future generations long after its current passengers have died. He pictures the ebb and flow of a constant ocean, the buzzing streets of Manhattan, the hills of Brooklyn, and several other striking images. In the poem, the ferry plays a role as a potent metaphor: it is the bridge between the present and the future.
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide (1058).
Nature plays a similar role as something that remains constant in the face of a changing, evolving mass of humanity:
Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg'd waves!(1061)
The vivid, grandiose imagery Whitman presents is made more potent because he is focusing on what many would consider to be a mundane scene. He casts the ferry as a bridge between the present and the future, and exalts the natural scenery he depicts as a reminder of the constancy of our world.
All line numbers were retrieved from The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 1 7th Ed
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