Literary Dude: Walt Whitman and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

How 19th century American poet Walt Whitman speaks to today's divided politics.

Walt Whitman’s 1856 poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is not his best known poem, but it is a masterwork of perception, emotion and expression.

The first and last stanzas of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” are shown below. You can read the complete poem

1

Flood-tide below me! I watch 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!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose.
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

* * *

9

* * *

We descend upon you and all things—we arrest you all;
We realize the soul only by you, you faithful solids and fluids;
Through your color, form, location, sublimity, ideality;
Through you every proof, comparison, and all the suggestions and determinations of ourselves.

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you novices!
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward;
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us;
We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us;
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.

     --1856

In 1855, the then unknown Whitman chose this portrait to run opposite the title page of his first collection of poems, Leaves of Grass.  Whitman’s image of himself as a poet-pirate announced a new literary esthetic for a rapidly expanding America.

Whitman sent an unsolicited copy of the self-published Leaves of Grass to Ralph Waldo Emerson, then the most prominent person in American literature.  On July 21, 1855, Emerson responded with a generous and encouraging letter about Whitman’s work:

I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our Western wits fat & mean.  I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception can only inspire.  I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.

Whitman saw the value of the letter immediately and publicized it as widely as he could.

Emerson was intuitively correct—Whitman’s “long foreground somewhere” included work as a printer’s assistant, typesetter, teacher and as the founder and editor of the Long Islander.  In 1846, he became the editor of The Brooklyn Eagle, where he was fired for political reasons.  In the years before publishing Leaves of Grass Whitman ran a printing business, a bookstore, and a housebuilding business.  He wrote freelance journalism before he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass which he revised and added to for the rest of his life.

The “Sun-Down Poem” Becomes “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

Whitman published new poems the next year, 1856, in a second edition of Leaves of Grass.  One of these new poems, the “Sun-Down Poem,” was continually revised and by 1860 it was called “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”  The poem’s buoyant 12 stanzas are an antidote to our era’s text/email/tweet abbreviated communications modes.

Whitman’s torrent of words may be off-putting to those who like poetry in Emily Dickinson-style super-concentrated language.  Yet, Whitman (and this is especially true when “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is read aloud) is not wordy.  You are sincerely encouraged to read “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” slowly and, if possible, aloud.  It will absolutely be worth your time.

Whitman and New York’s Ferries

Whitman, a Long Island native, was intimately familiar with the ferries in the New York archipelago.  In Specimen Days, one of his prose works, Whitman echoes the poem when he describes his relationship with the ferries and waterways of New York:

Living in Brooklyn or New York city from this time forward, my life, then, and still more the following years was curiously identified with Fulton ferry, already becoming the greatest of its sort in the world for general importance, volume, variety, rapidity and picturesequeness.  Almost daily, late (’50 to ’60) I cross’d on the boats, often up in the pilothouses where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surroundings. What oceanic currents, eddies, underneath—the great tides of humanity also, with ever-shifting movements.

Reading “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” jumps off the page with energy.  Whitman personifies and addresses the natural world directly.  In the first stanza, he sees “face to face” both the “[f]lood tide below me” and the “[c]louds of the west.”

Whitman’s vision and imaginative embrace include the ferry passengers he sees and everyone who has ever taken, or ever will take, the ferry.  The third stanza begins:      

It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not;
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;
I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.

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;
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh'd;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem'd pipes of steamboats, I look'd.

The lengthy recital of shared experiences and images which follows consolidates a feeling of surpassing commonality and community—Whitman professes an intense and indiscriminate affection for others, seen and unseen.

The expansiveness of Whitman’s view—he seems to see everything before him in great detail—matches the expanse of his embrace of humanity.  Whitman exults that:

I too saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look'd at the fine centrifugal spokes of light around the shape of my head in the sun-lit water, that
Look'd on the haze on the hills southward and southwestward,
Look'd on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
Look'd toward the lower bay to notice the arriving ships,
Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops—saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars,
The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses,

Stanza 5 takes the other side of the argument by examining that which divides us—doubt, human failure, and evil in various forms.  Whitman frames the possible divide between his countrymen this way:

            What is it then between us?

            What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever the differences are that divide Americans, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” assures that such differences can be overcome. Whitman tell us that “it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not.”   

According to Whitman, our shared experience includes the affirmative and the negative aspects of life and experience. Stanza 7 shows Whitman’s surpassing empathy for others:

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw patches down upon me also;
The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious;
My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? would not people laugh at me?

Whitman and the Civil War

The empathy Whitman showed for others in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” was evident in his life, not just in what he wrote.  Whitman was too old to fight in the Civil War but he was deeply moved by an 1862 visit to the front when his brother, George, was wounded fighting for the Union at Fredericksburg. George sustained a minor injury but Whitman never forgot the carnage he saw at the front.

Whitman returned to Washington where he became almost a full-time daily nurse and comforter to wounded soldiers from both sides of the war who were hospitalized in Washington.  Much of his later poetry describes his experiences going from ward to ward to comfort soldiers recuperating from devastating wounds.

The story of Whitman’s selfless, and self-imposed, service on behalf of the wounded of the Civil War is told eloquently in a 2008 PBS American Experience documentary.  Information on the film is available

Critical Perspectives

Yale professor and literature mega-authority Harold Bloom wrote an Introduction and Celebration to a 2005 reprint of the first edition of Leaves of Grass which marked 150 years since the book’s publication. (1)

Even though “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” was not included in the first edition, Bloom could not resist quoting the poem’s ninth stanza:

I have titled this introduction a “celebration,” not only because it is now a century and a half since Leaves of Grass was first published, but also to show gratitude to Whitman.  Who except Whitman could have so greatly redeemed the entire tradition of Western Literature?

Bloom, a rigorous critic, holds Whitman in the highest possible regard.  His Introduction and Celebration, calls Whitman “…still the greatest writer engendered by the New World, whether in American English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.  None of the possible rivals in the United States is finally of Whitman’s eminence.” 

For Bloom, Whitman’s genius is in the strength of the connections the poet establishes with his readers. Bloom “can think of no other poet who addresses the reader as directly,” as exemplified by this:

Closer yet I approach you;
What thought you have of me, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance;
I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born.
   
Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me

Bloom asks, in wonderment and admiration:

How could the “Sun-Down Poem” of the second Leaves of Grass (1856), later retitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” change so radically the immemorial covenant of intimate separations between reader and poet?

Other authorities are similarly admiring of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry:”

With exalted and sustained inspiration the poet presents a transcendent reality unlimited by the tyranny of time or person a space, a poetic demonstration of the power of appearances—”dumb, beautiful ministers”—to affirm the soul. Philosophical in theme, the poem is yet profoundly personal—his own daily experience made illustrious—and its strength lies in its aesthetic vision. (2)

Why Whitman Connects to Our Time

Editorial writers and columnists now write endlessly about our tendencies to atomization and tribalism.  Our politics and social interactions often devolve into insular social or interest groups that show anything from a guarded attitude to outright hatred of the “other”—people who look or think or act differently from “us.” Whitman reminds us that, even with the looming Civil War, Americans had, and still have, much more in common than that which divides us.

When the rhetoric of hatred or denigration of the “other” becomes essential political rhetoric it results in the rise of fascism.  Yale professor Jason Stanley writes, in his acclaimed book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (3):

The most telling symptom of fascist politics is division.  It aims to separate a population into an “us” and a “them.”  Many kinds of political movements involve such a division; for example, Communist politics weaponizes class divisions.  Giving a description of fascist politics involves describing the very specific way that fascist politics distinguishes “us” from “them,” appealing to ethnic, religious, or racial distinctions, and using this division to shape ideology and, ultimately, policy. (p. xvi)

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” does not just, as Bloom said, “change the separations between reader and poet.”  The poem obliterates the concept of the “other,” or reduces it to something inconsequential. 

Some people have adopted the practice, in correspondence and elsewhere, of identifying their pronoun choices, for example, “she/her” or “he/him” or “they/their.” For Whitman, there is no “you and I” and there is barely an “us” or a “we.”  He is the poet of a world in which pronouns are unnecessary.

The final stanza of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is worth special attention.  Whitman brings the poem to a crescendo that emphasizes the oneness of human experience, including the “dumb ministers” of nature and appearances. Whitman’s final call for inclusion is magisterial:

We descend upon you and all things—we arrest you all;
We realize the soul only by you, you faithful solids and fluids;
Through you color, form, location, sublimity, ideality;
Through you every proof, comparison, and all the suggestions and determinations of ourselves.

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you novices!
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward;
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us;
We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us;
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.

Final Thoughts

Two concluding thoughts for those who have read this far:  First, thank you very much.  Second, please take a minute to read “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” again.

Of course, your comments are very welcome.

(1) Leaves of Grass—The First (1855) Edition, Penguin Books, New York, (2005.)

(2) Leaves of Grass—Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York, (1965) edited by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley, p. 159.

(3) How Fascism Works—The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley, Random House, New York, (2018.)