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.
Literary Devices
Form
Although the poem went through significant revisions as it appeared in different volumes of Leaves of Grass, the most anthologized and most quoted iteration is the 1860 version’s nine stanzas separated by Roman numerals. Each stanza has a varying number of lines: The shorter stanzas, Stanzas 4 and 7, are when the speaker leans in and directly addresses the reader. These create urgency and immediacy; the longer stanzas, Stanzas 3 and 9, reflect the speaker’s moments of expansive vision, either in space (sweeping across the Manhattan harbor) or across time (feeling the edgy energy of eternity itself).
The poem itself, like all the poems in Leaves of Grass, is open verse. In defiance of conventional concepts of anticipated rhythm and pre-set rhyme schemes, the poem establishes its own organic form. Each line is an independent, self-contained formal expression. The form is defined with three strategies.
First, the poem uses a device known as anaphora in which the speaker deliberately begins a series of lines with the same word or repeats a phrase, for instance, “Others” (Stanza 2), “Just” and “Saw” and “Looked” (Stanza 3); or the phrases “not wanting” (Lines 75, 76) “great and small” (Line 85), and “I too” (Lines 27, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 71).
In addition, the speaker uses cataloging to create a formal coherence. To match the voracious spiritual vision of the poem’s themes, Stanzas burst into inventories, line after line of what the commuter-speaker records through the vehicle of his open and alert senses. Cataloging creates a sense of the casual abundance of the wonders of the world all about the speaker, the other commuters, and ultimately the reader.
Third, Whitman uses repetition to build an incantatory feel to the poem. Given Whitman’s belief that the world was infused with spiritual energies, he borrowed this formal technique from both Christian and Eastern religious literature. Chanting creates a gentle percussive feel as each line, abiding by its own internal punctuation, generates its own formal integrity when recited. Ultimately, Whitman’s form happens in the ear, not on the page.
Meter
Whitman inherited and summarily rejected centuries of poetic convention that elevated prosody as the defining skill of the poet. A poet was able to take the raw and messy blab of conversation and sculpt it into tight clean patterns, creating aesthetic value from the manipulation of a beat, experimenting with variations to avoid singsong monotony but never abandoning the perception of meter as the signature device of poetry.
The fact that to contemporary readers such a rigid premise seems arbitrary and even tyrannical in its assumptions about poetry and poets is largely because of Whitman’s metrics, his perception of a line of poetry creating its own organic rhythm. Any lines in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” reveal their own meter, or rather their own tempo. In forsaking beat and experimenting with tempo, the irregular manipulation of meter to create a deep aural effect, Whitman freed poetry from meter. Consider these lines:
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide (Lines 18-19).
The first line reflects the energy of Whitman’s expansive vision, the second a reflection on its energy. Meter is achieved through chantlike repetition as the time frame itself expands. The second line, however, slows the meter through a cooperation of rich, long vowels, sibilant s’s, and lingering l’s. The repetition of three hyphenated words creates a chance for the reader to move quickly between the separated words.
Speaker
The speaker here is the iconic persona that the failed housepainter, disillusioned schoolteacher, flamethrowing journalist, and opera buff Walter Whitman, Jr. created: Walt Whitman, Great American Poet, Epic Visionary, and Transcendental How-to Instructor. That grand “barbaric” “yawp” (a word critics used to disparage Whitman’s poetry, but a word Whitman embraced) sounds in nearly all of the expansive and urgent poems in Leaves of Grass. But what is of interest here is not so much the speaker—that is consistent with nearly all the thundering poems of Whitman’s maturity—as the ever-expanding use of “you.” Whitman manipulates a poetic device known as the apostrophe in which the poet directly addresses (usually a person) without the expectation the addressee will answer, at least not within the confines of the poem.
The speaker initially addresses the natural setting around him, which is the East River harbor. In the opening stanzas, for instance, the speaker talks directly to the river and its rhythms, to the sunset and its iridescent colors, and to the hills with their undulating shadows. That direct address, that “you,” is not unusual for a Transcendentalist, such as Whitman, who felt a giddy connection to the vibrant organic world. The “you” then expands to the faceless, soulless drones, the other commuters on the deck of the ferry who are not experiencing the same organic moment. In a poem that celebrates an animated organic world whose energy defies time and space, beginning in Stanza 5, the speaker happily shatters the frame of the poem itself and speaks directly to the reader. When the poem was originally crafted (in 1856), Whitman was among the most earnest and least-read poets in Manhattan. The poem’s expansive vision, then, which assumes readers centuries down the line, is the very voice of Transcendental unity.
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