23 pages • 46 minutes read
Walt WhitmanCrossing Brooklyn Ferry
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1856A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Energy of Consanguinity
Whitman takes the simplest and most available urban construct—a ferry boat taking hordes of unmotivated passengers from Manhattan back to Brooklyn, and offers a daring argument: He and his fellow passengers are in this together, bound together in a single resplendent energy field: “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt” (Line 22). The intimacy the speaker offers is not the superficial kind of love assumed between people. Rather, he offers a vision of a singleness of all organic matter, a commonness that is blood-deep, what he terms in his essays as consanguinity, a term Whitman, ever the autodidact, borrowed from the nascent science of evolution to denote how at our most basic level, we are the same, expressions of a grand organic one-ness.
Nearly a century before genetics would catch up to Whitman’s complex vision, Whitman perceived (and celebrated with gusto) the reality of humanity’s unity, how despite the obvious and distracting differences, human beings are manifestations of a single radiant energy. Even as we keep our distance, even as we provoke isolation and embrace ego, the world itself begs to differ. Whitman would hardly be surprised when cutting-edge genetics in the mid-20th century first suggested that all organic matter was made up of the elaborate variations of four nucleotides, that all living matter from the bacterial mold on a shower curtain to the president of the United States was made up of adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. The speaker reassures those all about him on the deck of the ferry, each in their own dreary world, that they are, in fact, a “we,” a startling logic that elevates even the meanest experience, such as a mundane evening commute, to the meaningful.
The Nearness of Eternity
What marvels the speaker about those commuters and the experience of commuting, a metaphor for the experience of life itself and the incessant movement toward the terminal point of mortality, is how that experience bursts through the apparent absoluteness of time. He sees what commuters in 50, 100 years will see. The sunset he delights in, the choppy waves that slap against the ferry, the hills that collar Brooklyn, the hulking seabirds that glide overhead—everything he sees will be part of the world a century later. In his bold breaking of the frame of poetry and directly addressing his unnamed reader, the speaker catapults beyond the limits of time and points out the irony of our obsession with measuring eternity out into tiny units of hours, days, weeks, years, centuries. Whitman’s speaker asks readers to step into eternity with him.
For Whitman’s speaker, eternity is as near as the willingness to perceive it, to feel its raw energy: The experience of the world is an expression of eternity itself. In affirming the constants in what appears to be a fluid and ever-changing environment (a boat on a river), Whitman reassures his reader, whom he directly addresses, to fear not the slow approach of eternity. It is here already, all about, dazzling and electric.
The Easy Dazzle of the Immediate
The speaker’s leap of faith in the poem, encouraged by Whitman’s voracious ingestion of Emerson’s Transcendental gospel, requires as much fortitude and conviction as leaps of faith for any religion. But even if the reader resists Whitman’s argument that everything about us—rocks, trees, birds, the sun, even other people—is struck from the same cosmic solution, what Whitman still offers is a reassuring faith in the tonic variety of stuff all about waiting for the open eye to tap into its enchantment. The world is stunning. It is not as if Whitman, like some latter-day Romantic, sweeps the reader off to some sublime landscape in the Alps or some breathtaking panoramic vista of the American West. It is rush hour. These are commuters. That is the East River. Those are industrial factories along the river. And, yes, they dazzle.
Whitman’s speaker cannot resist bursting into catalogs, carefully crafted lines, but lines that reflect a soul in dizzy animation taking it all in. Everywhere he turns, Manhattan burns alight with wonder. In Stanza 3, for instance, the speaker explodes into a chant that celebrates, line after line, Manhattan. How sad, Whitman argues, that the ferry passengers cannot rouse themselves sufficiently to be part of their world.
Related Titles
By Walt Whitman
