Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is a poem by Walt Whitman, and is part of his collection Leaves of Grass. It describes the ferry trip across the East River from Manhattan to Brooklyn at the exact location that was to become the Brooklyn Bridge.

Summary and analysis

The speaker begins half an hour before sunset, and continues into the evening with a description comparing the tides to the attraction of New York City. Cataloguing and an appeal of the body and soul feature prominently in the poem, relating to Whitman's experiences in growing up in Brooklyn from 1823 to 1833 and then 1845 to 1863.[1]

The poem specifically addresses future readers who will look back on it, and the ferry ride, years hence. In the first stanza, Whitman writes:

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

Whitman was inspired by the Fulton Ferry and those who used it for daily commutes before the construction of bridges connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan.[2] Despite the mundanity of the trip, Whitman portrays a celebration of the cityscape and the water, as well as the people taking the ferry, and humanity in general.[3]

Composition and publication history

Whitman first published the poem with the title "Sun-Down Poem" in the second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856,[2] following the poem "Poem of You, Whoever You Are".[4] The idea for the original title appeared as early as 1839 in "Sun-Down Papers, From the Desk of a Schoolmaster".[4] It was published as "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and as an individual poem in 1860. In the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass, it was moved to be the third of twelve poems that followed the "Calamus" cluster.[2]

Whitman biographer Jerome Loving said the poem was "Whitman's greatest celebration of the transcendentalist unity of existence and is certainly the crown jewel of the 1856 edition."[4]

A portion of the poem is used as an inscription at the Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn Heights, where the ferry landed. A Brooklyn ice cream maker, Ample Hills, takes its name from a line in the poem.[5]

References
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
  1. Walt Whitman Archive Chronology. Retrieved on 2013-09-19.
  2. Oliver, Charles M. Critical Companion to Walt Whitman: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York City: Infobase Publishing, 2005: 64. ISBN 978-1-4381-0858-2
  3. Hughes, Evan. Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life. New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2011: 19. ISBN 978-0-8050-8986-8
  4. Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1999: 219. ISBN 0-520-21427-7
  5. Kral, Georgia (24 April 2014). "NYC ice cream: The best shops from Morgenstern's to Ample Hills". AM New York. Newsday. Retrieved 28 July 2016.


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