Reading Post 9/08

Walt Whitman shares the same idea that most New Yorkers have, there’s nothing better than New York City. Moreover, Whitman also feels the same feeling riding the ferry in the 1800s as we do riding the train today; we tend to feel alone. Despite having thousands of people riding the subways daily and having 30 or more individuals in one cart, no one sparks a conversation and this even happened back in the 1800s as Whitman explains, “Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word”. Every New Yorker today can relate to this feeling as they rush to word during peak hours. This poem just makes me see that New York City has always been the city that people are running from point A to point B. In other words, this poem reinforces the idea that New York City has been the city is the busiest city that no one sleeps. What I’ve enjoyed about the poem is how descriptive Whitman is on what the narrator sees other people doing which makes one wonder if they are still individuals like narrator today. The poem starts with a thorough analysis of what the individuals boarding the ferry are doing. For example, the narrator states how some “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”. It is weird that the narrator is paying so much attention to the people riding the ferry but then again it is something that we should all sometimes do, stay aware of our surroundings. However, as I had one of my coworkers read this poem, we had a discussion that what the narrator is doing is not weird at all because growing up in Puerto Rico she used to pay attention to what everyone was doing regardless of the place she was in so observing people without their knowledge can be weird but it is up to the person judging the act. Nonetheless, Whitman’s style of writing is very interesting as he repeats the first letter of each line. For example, in verse two, stanza 1, Whitman uses the word “The” to start each line. Whitman continues this type of repetition throughout the poem especially in verse 3 with the words, “Just, Look’d, and I”.