What is it then between us?
Walt Whitman "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1856, 1881)
Last week: Edgar Allen Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842)
This week: Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856, 1881)
Next week: Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower (1993)
Walt Whitman is a Bigtime Big-effing Deal in American poetry. Here’s Brooklyn Library celebrating his 200th birthday with a reading of today’s poem:
I feel silly taking any time to introduce Walt Whitman here to you. You know him already, right? By 1881, when the poem was published in its final form in Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s sales of his poetry was steady; he was now recognized in the streets of his beloved New York; he was on the lecture circuit. One of his letters from October 1880 reports,
“I am selling quite a good many of my books now—gives me something to do every day—so you see I have enough to put me in quite a good humor.” “One of the ferry men told me he heard a lady say to another on the boat yesterday as I went off, ‘He looks older & savager than ever, don’t he? but there is a something—I dont wonder that Aleck is all taken up with him’ &c &c—Aleck, the ferry man thought, was her husband”
Whitman was 62, and he had been publishing poetry since 1855, about when this poem was first composed. He is haughty enough to know that we will be reading him today. He knows we are here. He cast out this poem like a fly fisherman and caught me. He planned for us to be here, reading his poem together, far in the future.
Closer yet I approach you, What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance, I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born. Who was to know what should come home to me? Who knows but I am enjoying this? Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?
The critical literature on Whitman calls this aspect of his poetics the “rhetoric of contact,” namely, that he envisions in the poem a moment when future readers will be taking in his words, and he describes this with mind-melding, intimate certainty and direct address. This rhetoric has many faces in as many poems. Most famously, in “Song of Myself” the rhetoric of contact between reader and poet can be found in the rhythm of the language, as Whitman controls our breath as we read his long lines. He says, “If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles” (aka in the earth beneath you) and “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” Yes, he means you, me, all the people reading him, forever. One student summed this up as “creepy, yet strangely comforting.”
In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the “you’s” he addresses are not only the other riders of the Brooklyn Ferry, who ride with him that day, but also, all people, everywhere, all future riders of the ferry, and those who read this poem, ferry-riders or no. It is a bold claim for a poet, to imagine a future readership, to understand himself as speaking to a reader “50 years hence,” “100 years hence,” “or ever so many hundred years hence” and to believe that he will understand them, who they are, and what they feel.
It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not. I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence, Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd, Just as you are refresh'd....
The certainty of a knowing future gets me every time. He believes that others will do as he has done, and will feel as he has felt, hundreds of years into the future. And, by extension, I am invited to know what he feels, hundred plus years into the past. I asked my students about that idea the other day — did they believe in that certain future — did they believe that future humans would share aspects of their experiences, their feelings or their commutes, in 100s of years? Responses were decidedly mixed. Will people still be reading Whitman in a 100 years? I asked. Definitely.
As Whitman looks down at the water rushing beneath him, with “mast-hemmed Manhattan” rising before him, and seagulls “oscillating” above, he sees his reflection in the water and imagines another reflection taking its place. He thinks of my reflection taking its place. So now, I admit, if I am crossing a river and have the opportunity to look into the water, he’s placed his words in my mind and I use them, as if they belonged to me. How I feel about the experience is heightened, defined, and enhanced by this poem that I have read and taught so frequently for the last 20 years, all in places where the water flows on around and beneath my daily life.
What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face? Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?
With these lines, Whitman called a future reader into being, and now, here I am living out his fantasy.
The similitudes of the past and those of the future, The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river, The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away, The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.
Others will do as I do, and feel as I feel, Whitman insists. In section 3 of the poem, he gives us a gorgeous description of “the glories” of what it was like to ride the Brooklyn Ferry, and I love it for its difference from my experience.
“I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine.”
I lived in Brooklyn from 2000-2009, and I loved living in Brooklyn more fiercely than I thought it was possible to love a city, and I loved being a part of New York’s energy at the turn of the last century. “I too walk’d the streets” that Whitman walked. (I could not ride the ferry though, there wasn’t one until the Water Taxi came around. The Brooklyn bridge opened in 1883.) But the city I looked on was different — there were fewer masts, only one I can remember at South Street Seaport, and the hills of Brooklyn were no longer visible. I don’t know what a “lighter” is, there are no foundries or sailors in the riggings, no pendants streaming. Yet he insists:
“These and all else were to me the same as they are to you.”
What I take away from this is that the ferry and the beautiful scene he paints from its railings are recorded in this poem as opportunities for a little think, about flux, time, and the shared experience of humanity. The buildings, sky, masts, and gulls — are “dumb, beautiful ministers,” that the poet can make into images: “we use you” he says, to understand ourselves. The place avails not.
This meditation begins with the “curiosity” of others — all the other passengers on the ferry are curious to him, and he sees them as strangers, but only for a stanza — and then lands on the “certainty of others,” and ends the poem with this pair of lines:
You furnish your parts toward eternity, Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.
Whitman uses the word “soul” in the singular. There is one soul for all of us, in the past, present, and future, and if you read the end of the poem closely, the buildings, sky, masts, and gulls are included in this “soul” of the world. These elements— objects, humans, water, and birds — are the “necessary film” of the world, which “envelops” the soul in a form we can recognize, as subjects and objects.
There are parts of the poem that suggest that we are playacting at being in these bodies, in these identities, in this time period. We take the form of our bodies, leaning against the rail, but they do not define us. There are moments in the poem that describe the closeted experience of a queer man in 1850s New York, who “saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word.” He says he played “the same old role” as he wished to be “call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices.” He says that there are moments of darkness in his life, of self-doubt, of resentment in his heart. “The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me” he writes. Something in us “withholds” us from truly feeling at one with our communities, our identities, our natural surroundings, our environments, our past, present, and future selves, stretching into eternity. That holistic version of experience calls out to him from the reflection of his face, crowned by “fine spokes of light,” in the rushing water.
This post has quickly become esoteric and metaphysical, without apology. To bring it back to earth—yesterday, I listened to this poem again on the train, as I headed into class to teach it. There was something about the confluence of commuting with Whitman that allowed me to truly feel the experience as a moment of similitude, as he envisioned. These lines, in no particular order, struck me as fresh and new as if I had thought them right then and there — I scribbled them down as fast as I could:
be firm, rail over the river It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall. you furnish your parts...great or small I loved well those cities all near to me What is it then between us? The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious My great thoughts...meagre? Was one with the rest refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting You have waited, you always wait Thrive cities! Live, old life!
Then I looked up, enjoying the rocking of the train car, so like the rocking of the lines in the poem. The yellow morning light striking the faces of the other passengers, nearly a hundred faces in the car with me arrayed over books and phones and in conversation with each other, and though they were “attired in the usual costumes,” these other humans were suddenly made amazing by these words as I looked on with, once again, Whitman in my ears.