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Crossing Brooklyn Ferry " - Walt Whitman

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Crossing Brooklyn Ferry " - Walt Whitman
Journal-" Crossing Brooklyn Ferry " - Walt Whitman

" Crossing Brooklyn Ferry " is a poem told from a man on a ferry between Manhattan and Brooklyn. The journey begins with the man leaning over a railing look into the water. The man ( Walt Whitman ) sees the clouds and the sun set reflected in the water and personifies them as "you". Throughout the poem Whitman will personify many other things in the poem. The business people and workers on the ferry a reflectively "curious" to him. As the ferry carries its passenger to the shore Whitman ponders about the people who will make the same crossing for years to come.
" 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;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,
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." (p.21-22 #13-19) Whitman makes a connection to something larger than himself of how the past and the future mirror each other. Every event around him is seen by him as "glories". While people appear to make the same crossing as him and see the same things, ( like the sunset and the tides ) they take it for granted that these things will exist even in a hundred years. This poem reminds us to reflect and appreciate what is around us. Our memories begin with the etchings of our experience. Whitman's poem slows the frames in our life to nudge us to embrace life for living and transformation purposes
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