Summary Of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry By Walt Whitman

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is a nine section poem written by Walt Whitman that was originally published in 1856, then revised and republished in 1881. The poem seems to be an attempt to address the future to an audience that is composed of people from the future. Whitman's first section opens with imagery of what the character is seeing in his immediate vicinity. Whitman begins to consider the other people on the ferry with him and those that are on the other ferries on the river. With the words: “...how curious you are to me,” and, “...more curious to me than you suppose,” gives the reader the sense that the character is beginning to fixate on the thought of these people and their lives (Whitman 123). The fixation turns to serious contemplation
The care he takes in describing the scene gives the reader the sense that he holds a great amount affection for the area and the people. He later expresses that affection in section four: “I loved those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river, The men and I saw were all near me” (Whitman 125). It seems that by the end of section 4 he begins to realize that other people on the boat must be have the same thoughts as he is since they begin to notice him in much the same way he had noticed them. At this point of the poem the character is now able to “address them [the readers] in the familiar tone that to readers of his day must have seemed shockingly intimate” (Smith). In section five this intimate nature comes out as a comparison of himself and the reader. When he says, “it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,” rather than addressing the all-encompassing identity like he did before he is now addressing “the shared experience of the common, the immediate, as well as the abstract, the ineffable...” (Whitman 125,
It can even be said that what he outlines in section six reveals that he is truly a human individual, with the all the faults and negative emotions that all humans past, present, and future have experienced. This becomes apparent in his testimony that he lays out: “I am he who know what it is to be evil, I too knitted the old knot of contrarity... ...Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping...” (Whitman 126). Section seven seems to be an outright statement directed towards the reader. When considering the following, “Closer yet I approach you... ...I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born... ...Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?” the reader understands that that this contemplation has made him so aware of those of the future that though the reader is following his thoughts precisely, the reader will never know him the way he knows the reader (Whitman