Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Whitman’s vision in the poem rests on embracing the (im)perfect in all things. However, a baffling yet persistent dilemma confronts the speaker as he stares at the vacant faces on the ferry: No one else seems willing or able to connect with the speaker by embracing this spiritual vision.

Whitman, given his faith in the democratic gospel of union, embraced poetry as an intimacy with the reader that defied time and space. Here, he uses sweeping lines of stately and uncomplicated emphasis (often set in the invitatory imperative) to reach out to the reader to upend their quiet complacency, to get them swept up even for a moment in the clarion energy of language itself: “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence” (Line 21)—so says Whitman in this grand celebration of hundreds of commuters packed on the ferry crossing from Manhattan to Brooklyn. The speaker finds himself surrounded by city workers who grind out their lives in soul-crushing routine. They therefore appear dulled to the prospect of spiritual revival.

The river, with its powerful current and its unstoppable eddies, symbolizes the grandeur of the moment. The river becomes Whitman’s grand

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