A Critique of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, a Poem by Walt Whitman

Before the now-iconic Brooklyn Bridge was complete in 1883, New York City residents commonly took ferries across the East River to travel between their homes in Brooklyn and their workplaces in Manhattan. American poet Walt Whitman, after one such journey, composed his poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in 1856. In it, Whitman, as he stands on the deck of a Brooklyn-bound ferry, surrounded by crowds of commuters returning home, reflects on his connection to them, as well as the connections between everyone on the planet, and uses the ferry ride as a symbol of the shared experiences and links between people.

Like other transcendentalist poets and writers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Whitman emphasizes an “oversoul” connecting each person to everyone else. Yet while Thoreau and Emerson often used nature and the natural world as symbolic of the Romantic ideal, Whitman's approach is quite the opposite - instead of focusing on the natural world, Whitman uses the sprawling city of New York City as his "muse" and symbol, reimagining and adding symbolic ties to it as a Romantic being.

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Through his crossing on the Brooklyn ferry, Whitman feels forever tied to the many

others that have made – and will make – this same journey, writing that:

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of

Brooklyn to the south and east,

Others will see the islands large and small.

..

Whitman takes this single shared and common experience of the ferry ride and expands it into something much greater: the shared experience of human life. All people on Earth, according to Whitman, can be connected through sharing the emotions, the feelings, the thoughts, the actions, the experiences of life.' The city of New York itself, vast and sprawling, is used and personified in the poem to illustrate this, as Whitman calls for the city to "Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! Stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!” and writes that the river and the city, like the collective soul and sharing of human experiences and connections, will forever flow and live on. Through the course of “Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman attempts to convey the idea that all people are connected through an “oversoul" – a network of connections through shared experiences that everyone has had or will have in their lives. Each person, "great or small,” Whitman writes, contributes their own part to the collective soul, much like everyone in a city becomes a contributor to the city itself. Whitman often makes use of the city as a symbol of the collective soul, making multiple comparisons between the connections of life and the connections of the city and the ferry. Not only do the passengers and residents live in the city, but, much like the transcendentalist concept of the oversoul, the city lives in them as well and becomes something that unites and connects each and every one of them to all the rest and to the collective soul of humanity.

Towards the end of his poem, Whitman describes the approach of the end of the ferry's journey, as the shore draws near and the ferry's passengers, at last, can catch a glimpse of those waiting for them on land. The ferry's journey, however, can also symbolize the journeys of immigrants arriving in New York City and in America, as they can finally glimpse the end of their long journey and the new life waiting for them on the shore. These immigrants, searching for a new life, searching for opportunity, searching for success, are linked amongst themselves through their journeys and struggles, yet when they arrive in the city and in America, they are also connected to everyone who has made the journey before them and will make it after them. Once they arrive, they also become Americans, and as Americans, they are further connected, and so the connections grow and expand.

In "Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry," Walt Whitman takes what, on the surface, can be seen as nothing more than a simple ferry ride across the East River and transforms it into a symbol of the collective sharing of life and experiences, using the growth of the city of New York and the flowing of the river to further illustrate his idea of the collective oversoul. Like his fellow transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman, although he eschewed the use of nature as a symbol in favor of the urban sprawl of the city, emphasized the connections between all of humanity, especially in "Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry," and captures the enormity of the human soul through his poetry.