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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Fulton Street Ferry
For Whitman, the 10-minute ride on the Fulton Street Ferry symbolizes functionality. Much like a contemporary subway train or a city bus, the ferry ride is a living, never-failing expression of urban life. Before the Brooklyn Bridge opened in the 1880s, the ferry bussed thousands of commuters every day to midtown and back, among them Whitman himself. The ferry has other meanings, however. As an acolyte of Emerson’s Transcendentalism, Whitman doesn’t believe in the limitations of any object. In the poem, the ferry comes to symbolize nothing less than the heroic journey of life itself. That symbolic value opens up the commuter ride to contain and envelop all of those on the ferry’s deck.
The poem is set in December, in the late afternoon (“the sun there half an hour high” [Line 2]). That season and time of day symbolically suggest the movement of each of us from birth to death as the afternoon sun concedes to the encroaching dark. But there is no hushed tragedy, no gloomy sorrow over the journey toward death. The movement is constant: No single journey, no single commuter defines or defies the journey. The poem sustains a sense of animation that fuses the individual and the communal journeys that we take. The speaker’s expansive vision celebrates how not only this generation of commuters but future commuters will be part of this spectacle: “Just as you feel when you look on the river and the sky, so I felt” (Line 22). All humans, Whitman celebrates, are forever on a journey homeward into eternity.
The Sun
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is a sunset poem. That might suggest a morbid surrender to the night, a conventional symbol of that which we most fear, often the oppressive reality of a death that is always approaching. The poem heroically juxtaposes images of gaudy and radiant light with the forbidding absolute of darkness. Set at sunset, a time that inevitably foretells the approach of night, the late afternoon commute is nevertheless soaked in dazzling light, the “glistening yellow” (Line 29) of its “fine centrifugal spokes of light” (Line 33) burnishing the ferry deck as well as the city with a “shimmering track of beams” (Line 32).
What stuns and puzzles the speaker is why his fellow commuters do not delight in that radiant energy. He acknowledges the “dark patches” that inevitably cross during life’s journey: “It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall” (Line 65). Nevertheless, the speaker offers his mystical perception of the sheer power of light. Dark symbolizes surrender, despair, ignorance. The sun that washes the entirety of Manhattan—its streets, its river, its people—represents the speaker’s intuitive optimism (“we fathom you not—we love you” [Line 130]). The gentle shimmer over the harbor symbolizes then the glory of the moment and how that moment irresistibly opens to an eternity suggested by the reassuring presence of the sun itself.
The East River
Of all the wonders that Whitman’s speaker celebrates as he casts his open and grasping eye about the cityscape, what never interests him is the city’s network of bridges that even then were helping residents avoid the congestion and risks of a commute across the East River. Indeed, by the time Whitman redrafted and revisited “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in the late 1870s and 1880s, the city was already providing an alternative way for Brooklyn’s nearly 150,000 residents to get to and from Manhattan: the Brooklyn Bridge. But bridges do not interest the speaker because they assume separateness, isolation, and offer dull, relative safety. Crossing the river, feeling its antic ebb and flow, its scalloped and cresting waves and its odd stretches of stillness, that physical sensation of the boat continuously adjusting to the river’s own fluid energy offers the speaker a symbol of engaging the variedness of everyday living.
The river symbolizes nothing less than the journey of living, the beautiful mystery of life, its uncertainties, vulnerabilities, joy and sorrow, agony and irony. Unavailable from the vantage point of a bridge, the river creates a community. On its open deck, the speaker feels the energy of that union.
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By Walt Whitman
