Christian Persaud
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry by Walt Whitman
Response:

     Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is a first-person account of a man on a journey back home on a Manhattan ferry. The author tells the story as a poem with vague and vivid imagery that is apart of a grand message. From early on in the poem we see that Whitman uses very surreal metaphors and descriptions to help readers envision this unique atmosphere. Aside from being a narration; Whitman decided to harness the powers of personification in the very first stanza: “Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face; Clouds of the west! Sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.” From this, we can presume that the water below and the clouds above are a form of entity in this poem. 

     On the next couple of lines, the narrator describes the fellow passengers as “crowds” and then by “hundreds.” We can say that this is an attempt to notify the readers that this narrator can transcend time of some sort when we read this line: “And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.” The second stanza holds a kind of parallel feeling to the reading we read in class. Through this line: “The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them; the certainty of others—the life, love, sight, hearing of others.” I believe the two passages are comparable because both talked about the distant connections between people. Furthermore, they both bring forth the idea of becoming one with strangers on a mental level. 

     Upon traveling, the narrator talks about stationary sea-gulls floating all about the river: “I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls—I saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow, I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south.” We see that there is some sort of spiritual element to the river that the ferry is traveling over. As someone who is familiar with Greek mythology, I can clearly see the familiarities Whitman brings from the River of Styx in Hades where human souls are floating around in the same fashion.