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 all-

expansive 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 over-

arching 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 “Flood-

tides” 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 19 th 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 “self-

asserting” — 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.