TITLE: THE VISION AND STRUCTURE OF “CROSSING
BROOKLYN FERRY”
Submitted by:
Natasa Thoudam
Independent Researcher
C-1 Naveen Terraces
75/15 S.T. Bed Layout
Koramangala Ring Road
4th Block
Bangalore 560034
Mobile: 91-9886514212
Abstract
Walt Whitman’s transcendental vision of the union of the poet with the readers of all
times finds expression in the poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’. This vision is intricately
interwoven with the poem’s structural movements. Whitman decorates his visions with
poetic devices of repetition, parenthesis, parallelism, lyrics, irregular rhythm and the allexpansive catalogues. This paper will examine how the synthesis takes place. This paper
will also show how the poem describes a journey both at symbolic and literal levels. The
significance of “crossing Brooklyn ferry” will be highlighted. The crossing of the
Brooklyn River through the poem happens structurally with three movements. Narcissism
involved in the poem will be discussed and Whitman’s transcendentalism will be put in
comparison with the more general American transcendentalism. The poem finally
concludes with the reconciliation of the dualisms: universal and particular, reason and
imagination, and body and soul.
Introduction
Walt Whitman’s transcendental vision of the magnanimous, non-dual, mystic self of the
poet engaged in spiritual, psychological, intellectual, emotional, cosmic/“kosmic” and
erotic union with the readers of all times finds expression in the poem, “Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry’. This transcendental vision is characterized by Whitman’s sense of
boundarilessness, of deathlessness, of timelessness and of spacelessness. This overarching vision is intricately interwoven with the poem’s structural movements. The poem
uses the travel motif to highlight Whitman’s philosophy of life as a journey towards the
attainment of the eternal peak experience — thus, rendering a sense of kinetic
motion/movement to the poem. Structurally, the poem is divided into three movements
each comprising of three sections (1–3, 4–6 and 7–9). The poet, Whitman, takes up the
persona of a public orator to transfigure an everyday pragmatic ritual into an artistic
statement which is an expression of an exceptional visionary experience. In addition,
Whitman decorates all these visions with poetic devices of repetition, parenthesis,
parallelism, lyrics, irregular rhythm and the all-expansive catalogues.
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: A Journey
The poem is an elaborate description of a journey at various levels; both literally and
symbolically. At the literal level, it is Whitman’s journey and the journey of the “crowds
of men and women”, to and fro, across the East River between Brooklyn and New York
(Manhattan). Symbolically, it is the readers’ journey along with Whitman and also their
journey through the poem. The journey motif of the poem is initially highlighted in the
title: “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”. The title, here, involves a tautology, a repetition with
difference of the words “crossing” and “ferry”. In this sense, the title will mean —
“Crossing Brooklyn Crossing”. The verb is in its continuous progress (“progression”),
not only linear forward moving but also cyclic; “a going and a return, a beginning and an
end and a new beginning”. (Miller) Such form of poetry writing has analogy with the
travel literature or travelogue in prose. The travel literature has its origin in early extant
stories composed in Egypt during the 12th Dynasty, a thousand years before the Odyssey
— and later incorporated in the Biblical and Classical traditions, in Books, like Exodus,
The Punishment of Cain, The Argonauts and The Aeneids. The “Long Journey” motif, as
Allen calls it, views life as a process — a “procession of souls along the grand roads of
the universe”. (Song of the Open Road) This finds expression in the poem, “Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry” wherein the whole experience of the ferry-ride can be symbolic of the
journey of life and in that journey the moving kaleidoscope of the sun-setting, people,
ships, objects, buildings, the sea-gulls and the natural landscape appears as if they are in
some kind of a “procession”. This journey may further signify the cosmic process, the
task of the poet or the search for the perfect “comrade” sometimes identified with the
reader. Also, Whitman urges “the reader into their own free journey: “I round and finish
little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme. The reader will always
have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display
any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or
thought — there to pursue your own flight”. Howard J. Waskow further observes that “if
he [Whitman] wants us to control our involvement: he would sent us on a journey, but
along a road of his making, a poem with an action we must trace”. Thus, “Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry” demands that imaginative “engagement” or “involvement” on part of the
readers. According to Waskow, it is the imagination of the poet and his readers which
“allows the private self to participate in the external world, and the two private selves,
poet and reader, to join experiences in the world of the poem”. It is the imagination of
Whitman which makes him state that: “Flood tide below me! I see you face to face!”
Also, “There and all else were to me the same as they are to you” and “fuses me
[Whitman] into you [readers] now, and pours my meaning into you?” These lines not
only display the beautiful imagination of the poet but also demands on the imaginative
faculties of the readers. Further, Whitman’s physical act of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is
“analogous to the “crossing” by the readers’ imagination, thereby, the reader tend to
identify with Whitman and see himself as part of “Whitman’s universe”. This universe
encloses within itself Whitman’s concept of the “Universal man”, the “individual,
personal self” who has “cosmic extent”. “It has potential power such as Nature does not
have in itself. It gives Nature meaning. It gives Nature meaning. It gives God and
immortality meaning also; without the individual man, the self, the person, they too are
nothing”. But this all-inclusive individual has social responsibility and carries with it the
political responsibility of the Democratic individual. The “self” which Whitman is
referring to here in the poem; the “I” is in constant process of identification, unity and
alignment with the “Not-Self” (other “you”), the nature and the cosmos/kosmos. These
identification, union and alignment are carefully executed in the three-movement
structure of the poem.
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in Three Movements
First Movement
The first movement from Sections 1 to 3 begins with an address to the clouds and “Floodtides” looking “face to face”, the ordinary “usual” crowds are special and “curious” to the
persona. And from them, he moves his attention to the readers, trying to establish a
communion. The self comes “face to face” with the “other”, herein the poem, they are the
“Flood-tides”, the ocean, the “usual” crowd and the reader “you”. In the second section,
there are a series of loosely connected images conceived in the poet’s mind explaining
the curious relationship he shares with his readers. It talks of “the impalpable
sustenance”, of “similitudes of the past and those of the future”. In this section, Whitman
is trying to create a community wherein individuals although “disintegrated” and though
assuming individuality remains yet part of “the simple, compact, well-join’d scheme”.
Every line in this section records an epiphany, an assurance, a conclusion and a
conviction. And one of the epiphanies is the feeling of a “simple, compact, well-joined
scheme” which is a designation of the architectonics of “kosmos”. These epiphanies are
referred to as “Glories”. The “Glories” are “Strung like beads on my smallest sights and
hearings.” The “beads” emphasizes the “disintegration”, the aloofness of the perceiver
whose senses will be like the string unifying experiences and yet be unchanged by it. The
“beads” also points to the idea of “The Great Chain of Being”, of the connected universe
wherein everything is connected with everything, everything is within everything else
and everything is a version of everything else. In Arthur Koestler’s term, “holonic”, that
is, everything is a whole and also a part of the whole simultaneously. Edwin Haviland
Miller further refers to the “beads” as “a hedonist’s rosary” and also “a kind of
democratic Chain of Being”. He further adds that “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is a serene
meditation on mutability in a world no longer concerned with the principle of plentitude
or the Great Chain of Being, but deeply concerned with the devitalization of the body and
the senses in the era of the machine. “The glories strung like beads” can also stand for the
umbilical cord between man and nature which gets severed when man refuses to use his
sense organs as receivers of miraculous impressions. “Similitude” is a recurring word in
Whitman’s vocabulary charged with Whitman’s private vision. It is not only an
awareness of the “kosmos” as a similitude but a visionary affection for everything that
makes a contribution to the similitude. The same word occurs in “On the Beach at Night
Alone” in the lines: “A vast similitude interlocks all, all spheres grown, ungrown …” In
order to heighten the word, “similitudes”, Whitman highlights the “Other-ness” with the
repetition of the word “Others”. There is a shift in focus from the “sensations” (“sights”)
of Section 1 to “similitudes” in Section 2. The identification is more direct in Section 3
with the use of “similes”:
Just as you feel … so I felt
Just as any of you … I was
Just as you stand … I stood
Just as you look … I look’d.
There is an outright rejection of the separation of time, place and distance which are
obstructions to the unity: “It avails not, time nor place — distance avails not”. The poet
makes his presence felt “quite simply and directly”: “I am with you, you men and women
of a generation, or ever so many generations hence”. In this section “similitudes”
becomes “identity”. In this passage with the use of catalogues, the poet re-creates the
experience of the “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”. The whole kaleidoscopic view of the
eternal journey is unbound by time, space, change of season and “turn of the day”. The
imagery through the use of tactile, kinetic, visual and olfactory images is attempting to
emphasize the “particularities”. Moreover, the shape of objects, colours and appearances
are given detailed attention. This technique of catalogue was first used in Section 15 of
“Song of Myself” and then in Section 33. The effect of the use of such a poetical device
was to give the readers an impression of the sacramental vision of the poet. It records the
“happenings” in the vicinity of the Brooklyn Ferry. The catalogue also embodies the
“mere consciousness”, the “appearances” of objects and the “sensations” without which
one cannot graduate to visionary similitude. The catalogue is both an “aesthetic device”
and “the expression of transcendentalist thought”. In their miscellaneousness is found a
kind of unity, as Steven’s Connoisseur says, “a great disorder in an order”. The piling up
of images conveys a sense of plentitude. Lawrence Buell wonders if “this pattern [of the
catalogue] was consciously formulated” and agrees that “its existence shows a sense of
order in Whitman’s part” — also, a sense of nature’s unity in diversity. But in Whitman,
Buell notices a concern less with man’s relation to nature than with his relation to other
man. The transcendental catalogue, as Buell calls, has its basis upon the sense of the
universe’s spiritual unity in diversity. Moreover, in general, the transcendentalist
literature is often formless. Since Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau regarded art
pragmatically as the “expression of something beyond itself — vision, truth”. They prefer
free perception of natural order to imposition of an aesthetic order to imposition of an
aesthetic order on the perceptions. Through his catalogue, Whitman is trying to “record
the movement from inactive observation to active participation in the spirit that lies
beneath all physical forms” and also the need to find an appropriate form to record that
movement and involve the reader in a similar journey. In clubbing together image after
image, Whitman desires that the reader forms a single image. In other words, Whitman is
presenting images simultaneously to induce the reader to condense. For instance, when
one views a motion picture, one views numerous images simultaneously. Also, the
picture frame is continually moving and probably changing which further challenges the
viewer’s perception. And this is the way in which Whitman desires his readers to engage
in. Thus for Whitman, the catalogue serves as the rhetorical means to describe two
journeys, Whitman’s movement away from self towards the universe or cosmos and
through the catalogue, the reader’s journey.
The change in tense from Sections 1 and 2 to Section 3 underlines a reversal in time. The
present of Section 1 becomes the past and the future of Section 2 becomes the present in
Section 3. This is to move the poet out of the past, over the barrier of time, into the
present with the reader. This style corresponds to St. Augustine’s (354–430AD)
celebrated pronouncement of future. According to him, both future and past are present
activities; future as present expectancy or anticipation (Akansha) and past as present
memory. He, therefore, concludes that future and past are immaterial, mental
construction of the present. In Indian expression, it is time as “Vasta Sunya”, that is,
empty by itself. The poem begins with Whitman’s acute anticipation of future which
brings forth the anticipated future. This anticipation is compounded by affection for
others. Consequently, the future becomes the present and the present becomes the past.
The “I see you” of Section 1 is now “so I felt” of Section 3. The “Others will see them”
of Section 2 becomes “Just as you feel” of Section 3. Whitman’s philosophy of time
includes both the sense of future and the sense of past. If the anticipation of future
corresponds to St. Augustine’s doctrine, the preoccupation with the past has its lineage to
the doctrines of history and objective truth. Richard J. Pendergast says that the
understanding of historical truth is linked with the understanding of being and change.
Further, the reality of the present does not cease to exist when it becomes part of the past.
It gets integrated into the subjective reality of the agents which produced it. He adds that
“Change is not … the replacement of one principle of being by another, but rather the
development of an enduring reality into something greater which still includes what was
there in the beginning. Thus, for Pendergast:
Change is development. The past exists within the present and is in fact the cause
of the new reality which is now existing for the first time.
He, then, draws an analogy between the development of the entire cosmos and the human
experience. At every instance, the past brings forth a new reality called “Objective
present”. This past is on the originative, subjective side of the action. And the new reality
is on the terminative, objective side. According to Pendergast, as each objective present
becomes a part of the past, it is integrated into the subjective reality of the agents. On the
highest level of the hierarchy, the objective present of the entire cosmos gets integrated
into the subjective reality of cosmic history.
Thus, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, the living poet of Section 1 becomes the dead poet
or the poet of the past and of the history. And the anticipated “crowd”, “men and
women”, of the future of Section 2 becomes the living crowd in Section 3. The poem also
has imaginary design of time, trying to be an approximation of “totum simul” that is,
simultaneous totality of God’s time. And the poem does rises to a certain order of
simultaneity. In the third section, sensation is the unifier of present and future. It is the
perpetually present eternal love. Another feature of Section 3 is the atypical way in which
the voice of the past addressed to the present invokes the glories of that past. In ordinary
present consciousness, past is often seen as insubstantial and spectral. And typically, it is
the present which brings out the past as in Neruda’s “Heights of Macchu Picchu”:
Second Movement
In the second movement, from Secctions 4 to 6, there is a shift from the sensuous world
of the first movement (Sections 1–3) to the world of emotions, common feelings and
impulses that are generally considered evil. The “arguments” as Miller points out moves
from the particular to the general. In Section 4, the closeness between the poet and his
reader increases both physically and emotionally as he says: “Others the same — others
who look back on me because I look’d forward to them”. Further in the second
movement, “sensation” is the unifier of not only past and present but of the poet and the
reader and of interior life. Section 5 opens with rhetorical questions:
What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
There is acceptance of distance but through it the rejection of distance:
Whatever it is, it avails not — distance avails not, and place avails not.
The poets’ sense of placelessness, that he is not confined to Brooklyn Ferry or any
particular place is reflected in the following lines:
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine.
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it.
The poet’s interior life— emotions — is revealed in Section 4, and in this section, he
focuses on his life within, his intellectual speculations: “I too felt the curious abrupt
questionings stir within me”. Earlier in Section 3, he was “one of a crowd”, but here, he
feels himself separate as he moves inward with his “curious abrupt questionings”. The
“floating” ideas of Section 2 get a clearer formulation in the lines:
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had received 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.
In many ways these three lines may be considered the heart of the poem. The “solution”
is symbolic of the spiritual inseparability and unity of all mankind. It also refers to
Science, a chemical solution which forms a precipitate on addition of some particular
new element. And consequently refers to Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Also, it
refers to the idea of the origin wherein an individual comes from and returns to the same
spiritual or divine source. Even if the individual is precipitated or “struck”, he is still
“held in solution” — he does not become completely separate. What remains in solution
is the soul; the body is precipitated and gives “identity”. In other words, it indicates the
existence of the common spiritual source separated only by out physical “identity”.
In Section 6, the poet further reviews the “ties” his interior life creates between him and
the reader but the emphasis is on the dark, sinister feelings. The identification is not
merely in terms of the virtues but also the most evil desires/vices:
It is not upon you alone that the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also
…
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety.
The “old knot” is Satan’s knot and the catalogue of the sins of mankind is followed by
the description of man’s individuality which exists solely in his body and it is the
physical existence of the body which made possible “man and varied sins”. (Miller)
In Whitman, we find the acceptance of the sins of the highest level but there is no
concession to evil. This indicates the mystical equanimity of a man who is able to accept
the power of blackness. In other words, Whitman has tried to arrive at the mystical
resolution of the power of blackness. The sense of separateness in Section 6 is presented
as self-doubt — the tendency towards evil. The individual leads a dark life but also plays
a “role” — “The same old role, the role that is what we make it …”
Third Movement
The last movement of the poem (Sections 7–9) tries to reconcile the two previous
movements. Sections 7 and 8 depict the final fusion and Section 9 recalls all the
identifying images and concludes with a song, a tribute to “sensations”. From the sensual
through the emotional to the imaginary closeness marks the movement till Section 7. The
assertion ‘Closer yet I approach you” suggests the approaching final resolution, the final
identification and the final union. The union is at the level of “psychic experience”:
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you — I laid in my stores in
advance.
The last line of the section implies the imminent spiritual union:
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all
you cannot see me?
The act of the “look” indicates self-reflection — the idea of mirror-image.
Section 8 comprises rhetorical questions in praise of the special life, the “curiousness” of
the sunset, the waves and other sights of the ferry crossing, the comrades attracted by the
speaker, the speaker himself and finally the reader. In this section, there are repetitions of
description which had already appeared in Sections 1 and 3. The section ends with the
acknowledgement of accomplishing knowledge of one’s spiritual identity with all
mankind. The line — “Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you”
— points to another kind of union: erotic fusion of man and nature, body and soul and
protagonist-poet and reader. Also, the “I” and the “you” becomes “we”.
Section 9 is a kind of recapitulation. It is a tribute to the “sensations”. The section is the
future of Sections 1 and 2, and it has words repeated from Sections 3 and 5–7. In other
words, it is a “textual allotrope”. The final section envisages a “peak experience”
(Maslow, Abraham H.) of “similitudes”, of unity, of identity. It is the experience in
which all the endowments mysteriously assemble into a blessed fulfillment, sexually,
emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and sensuously. It is the gift of complete meaning
of being. And it also indicates that the humblest sensation has a part in the “simple,
compact, well-joined scheme” and emphasizes on the idea of a connected universe. This
peak experience includes the poet’s epiphanic experience of the architectonics of kosmos.
“Appearances” refers to the visual images invoked in the preceding sections. When
Whitman asks: “Appearances … indicate what you are”, it is an attempt at the revelation
of reality. For Whitman, the “film” and the “aromas” are metaphors that embody the
spiritual in the physical. Also, there is an analogy drawn between the relationship of body
and soul with mother and foetus: The idea of objects as not existing independently but as
spiritually within souls of man. The objects are “dumb, beautiful ministers”, “dumb”
because they do not have the voices of men, “beautiful” because they speak appealing to
the senses and “ministers” because they minister finally like minister of religion, to the
spiritual life or soul.
Narcissism in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
Edwin Haviland Miller sees in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” a revelation of an act of
narcissism described in the first line itself:
Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face.
Reuben Fine traced the history of narcissism in man and defined three forms: the
narcissism of the ruler, the narcissism of the common man and the narcissism of the
psychotic. He found in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass powerful embodiment of the
narcissism of the common man. This form gained popularity in the 19th century and had
dominated ever since; it is today called the sense of identity or self-image. It resulted
from the overthrow of absolutism and the recognition of the significance of the
individual. Reuben Fine defined this narcissistic urge in Whitman as embracing all
mankind, heterosexually or homosexually. The identities between the reader and the poet,
the self and the other, man and man and man and nature embody strains of narcissism:
Self love expanded to all love.
In Section 4, there is the idea of a mirror wherein the persona seems to be looking at a
mirror:
Others the same — others who look back on me because I look’d forward to
them.
And in Section 7:
I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?
Here too, we find the act of looking at the other as one’s own self-image and trying to
formulate a unity and identity. But strains of narcissism tendencies which Edwin
Haviland Miller had noticed cannot overshadow the over-arching visionary of the poem
coupled by its elaborate form.
Whitman and American Transcendentalism
Whitman belongs to the tradition of the writers called the American transcendentalists
along with Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Melville. The transcendentalists
interpreted life ethically subordinating the aesthetic, intellectual and even political and
economic aspects of human nature to man’s role as “a moral agent” (David Bowers) They
believed in the doctrine of human individuality as both “self-transcending” and “selfasserting” — acknowledging oneness with others (“something higher than itself”) and yet
maintaining its “unique” and “independence” as an individual. For them, the intuitive and
the inductive are the two “necessary conditions” for the individual’s “conscious union
with the world-psyche” and also for his “survival as a separate expression of that
psyche”. Further, they saw man as the spiritual center of the universe and it is through
him that we find the clue to nature, history and cosmos. The “transcendentalist principle”
expresses that the structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the
individual self, and that all knowledge begins with self-knowledge. They believed in the
principle of common humanity emphasizing man as not only particular but also universal
and man as freed from the accidents/limitations of time and space as well as birth and
talent. Further, they aimed at the achievement of the self-realisation which depends upon
the harmonious reconciliation between the two contradictory impulses of the self, that is,
self-transcending and self-asserting. Also, for them, intuition and imagination serve as a
“surer road to truth” than abstract logic or scientific method.
Conclusion
Thus, in Whitman, we find this transcendental impulse to reconcile the duality of the two
“universal psychological tendencies” of the self, universal and particular, reason and
imagination and body and soul. Finally, all these constitute Whitman’s vision
marvelously expressed by the intricate structure in his poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”.
Works Cited
1. Allen, Gay Wilson (1997). A Reader's Guide to Walt Whitman. New York:
Syracuse University Press
2. Barbour, Brian M. (1973). American Transcendentalism: an Anthology of
Criticism. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press
3. Buell, Lawrence (1968 Nov). "Transcendentalist Catalogue Rhetoric: Vision
versus Form." American Literature 40:3. pp. 325-39
4. Fine, Reuben (1986). Narcissism, the Self, and Society. New York: Columbia
University Press
5. Koestler, Arthur (1990 reprint). The Ghost in the Machine. New York: Penguin
Group
6. Maslow, Abraham H. (1994). Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. New
York: Penguin
7. Miller, Edwin Haviland (ed.) (1964). Walt Whitman, The Correspondence. New
York: New York University Press
8. Miller, James E., Jr. (1957). A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press
9. Pendergast Richard J. (1973). Cosmos. New York; Fordham University Press
10. Waskow, Howard J. (1966). Whitman: Explorations in Form. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press
Biographical Blurb
Miss Natasa Thoudam intends to research on Contemporary Literary and Critical
theories. In addition, Feminist Theories, Post-colonial Theories, Poetry and Theatre
(especially Manipuri) are her areas of interest. Her favourite writers are John Keats,
Heisnam Kanhailal and Virginia Woolf. She has 4 years and 10 months of experience
both in publishing industry and teaching (4 years and 4.5 months in editorial roles at IDC
CCR, Macmillan, and DigiCaption and 5.5 months as an Assistant Professor at Acharya
Institute of Management and Sciences).
Miss Thoudam graduated in 2003 with a very good second honours degree, majoring in
English Literature, from Indraprastha College for Women, Delhi University. As an
undergraduate, she was the recipient of Anuradha Bhardwaj Memorial Prize for
consistent performance in B.A. English (Honours) for two consecutive years and
Barnhardt Kamath Trophy and Scholarship. After graduating, she went on to obtain a
distinction at Master’s level from the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages,
Hyderabad (now EFLU).
This paper was an assignment (revised here) as part of her course in American Literature:
Whitman and Faulkner.