Summary and Form
This poem first appeared in the 1856 edition and
received its final modifications for the 1881
edition. While "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," like most
of Whitman's poems, contains little in the way of a
describable formal structure, it features a great
deal of random internal patternings created by the
repetition of words and phrases. This sense of
repetition and revisiting reinforces the thematic
content of the poem, which looks at the possibility
of continuity within humanity based on common
experiences.
Commentary
This poem seeks to determine the relationship of
human beings to one another across time and space.
Whitman wonders what he means (not as a poet but as
another anonymous individual) to the crowds of
strangers he sees every day. He assumes that they
see the same things he does, and that they react in
the same way, and that this brings them together in a
very real sense. This is different than the "what I
assume you shall assume" credo of "Song of
Myself." Here
Whitman's sense of shared spaces and shared
experiences is akin to that of the Romantics, namely
Wordsworth and
Coleridge. This poem can be
profitably compared to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"
and Coleridge's "This Lime-tree Bower." In both of
those poems someone important to the
poet--Wordsworth's sister, Coleridge's friend--is taken to
a place that has been important to the poet.
Wordsworth accompanies his sister, and is able to
take delight in seeing her repeat his experience.
Coleridge is not able to go with his friend, however,
and he sits at home, wondering if his friend's
experience will have any meaning for either of them.
While Wordsworth is more concerned with the idea of
the power of place, Coleridge, like Whitman, is more
interested in the relevance of shared experience, and
its ability to potentially transcend barriers of
space and mortality.
In the end Whitman seems to give more credence to
shared experience than Coleridge does. Reminding
himself that others have seen, and fifty years from
now will still be seeing, the islands of New York
City, he realizes that others have also shared his
range of emotional and spiritual experience. This
makes him significant as an individual but also part
of a larger whole. Curiously this leads Whitman to
turn to the physical as a locus for identity: "I too
had receiv'd identity by my body, / That I was I knew
was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should
be of my body." The body is both a vehicle for
individual specificity and a means by which to
partake of common experience: it is where the self
and the world come together.
In his description of the New York waterfront Whitman
does not differentiate between the natural and the
man-made. Steamships and buildings are described in
the same terms as seagulls and waves. This seems to
be Whitman's nod to historical specificity, which can
disrupt continuity of experience. Fifty years before
Whitman's ferry crossing, the steamships and the
skyline were not there, and he knows this. It is
these minor changes that enable him to be specific,
and that allow perspective on human existence.
