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... -joined in their purpose of returning home are the crowds, who arouse genuine curiosity on the part of the poet. The costume-attired crowds become meaningful to Whitman in their crossing from shore to shore, to eternity (a hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them as they cross), they share with the poet the weakness, the doubt and the suspicion (The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? would not people laugh at me? ), and they partake with him the splendour of the moving images, the a temporal and a spacial harmony where I and you and they become we, where everyone assumes a role, the same old role in their quest for identity. Symbolically speaking, the river stands for the float forever held in solution from which identities are struck. The land, the mast head Manhattan is likewise a symbol of identity; it is the place where the poet is tied to his fellow men and women, it is the place where he is fused into them and where his meaning is poured into them. Visually speaking, the images Whitman creates construct the flowing motion of the verses and they are the more so pervasive as they are enhanced by shared feeling (Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river, and the bright flow, I was refreshed).
Stylistically speaking, the verses abound in parallelism- namely the parallel verbs used at the beginning of the lines (Flow on; Frolic on; Cross; Stand up; Sound out; Play; Live; ) which make the direct addressing both rhythmical and imperative- reiteration of ideas (the old role that is great or small, according as one makes it; you necessary film, continue to envelop the Soul), long enumeration, rich noun determination, and what Jannaccone calls the logical rime or the grammatical rhythm (Gay Allen): the repetition of parts of speech / grammatical constructions at certain places in the line (It avails not, neither time or place-distance avails not, I am with you, , I project myself- also I return-I am with you, and know how it is). The use of the pronoun is of utter importance since the pronoun is responsible for ultimately designating the sought-for identity. Thus, the I -which is not necessarily a person, but can be a personal image of the idealistic absolute (Lionel Trilling) -moves supply from the very beginning of the line to the last statement of the line (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 and then I too lived, (I was of old Brooklyn), I too walked the streets of Manhattan Island, ). The I is always in a face-to-face relation to You and towards the end of the poem they merge into We (We descend upon you and all things-we arrest you all, We realize the Soul only by you, ... ), while You is used to name the objects, the dumb beautiful ministers that achieve the Axis Mundi-like connection of Man with the Soul, with eternity. Four of Whitman's most famous poems celebrate ferry boats, interstate railroads, and the Suez canal as symbolic and psychological forces in nineteenth-century America. In most of his other poems, Whitman's visions of his world are chiefly of people walking in cities and in the countryside, even though he writes about that world from mid-century to the last decade. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1856) presents visions of flags and sails, large and small steamers, the big steam-tug, and pilot boats in the harbor of "mast home'd Manhattan, " a harbor which displays the "flags of all nations. " The harbor is subject to the tides and currents and it is surrounded by the hills of Brooklyn with their foundries and chimneys.
The ferry boat is both a vantage point and a refuge from the city. It carries crowds with their "usual costumes" from the city to their homes in the Brooklyn suburb, and it brings them together on the boat, furnishing "parts toward eternity" and "toward the soul. " The most significant 1856 poem is "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, " in which the poet vicariously joins his readers and all past and future ferry passengers. The two poems cover much of the same ground. Both celebrate new technologies; both involve passages; and both overflow with a deeply felt longing to connect with the reader. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, however, seems to narrate what in Passage to India is a static moment - the "passage to you" which partially resolves the poems tensions.
In Passage to India that address structure appears for a brief and fleeting moment, and the ambiguity of the address, which the poet seems to direct both to the reader and to his own soul, complicates it further. The passage is both between interior and exterior modes of existence as much as it is between the speaker of the poem and the individual reading it. This ambiguity is appropriate to the poem - mirroring the instability which (dis) organizes it throughout - but Crossing Brooklyn Ferry invokes a far more rigidly defined structure of address. The you is present throughout, and it refers explicitly to "men and women of...
generations hence" (Whitman, 116). Indeed the entire world that Crossing Brooklyn Ferry invokes is far more rigidly structured than that of Passage to India, and this I believe to be related to their difference in regional foci. Between these to poems exists an opposition which recreates Smiths argument in far more complex terms. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is linear and teleological (like the ferry trip itself). It invokes a lucid structure of address. It takes place not only in the east, but in perhaps the most completely built kind of environment of the nineteenth century - the urban metropolis.
Even the East River, the sunset and the clouds overhead - among the few "natural" images which make their way into the poem - are framed by the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn or by the Manhattan skyline to the west. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry thus inverts Passage to India's "natural"/"unnatural" dynamic, placing "nature" in the frame of "technology, " rather than - as in the case of the rail-road, placing technology in the frame of nature. The poems are telling us something about the meanings that were attached to American regions in the nineteenth century and about how those meaning may be understood and competing constructions of human interaction with a non-human world. If a built environment frames an un-built one than narration is possible because the world becomes one which lends itself to cognition via cultural constructions - a category to which both sky-scrapers and stories belong. Poetry of the East is thus poetry in which linear narration and direct address of the reader become possible. Everything is in its place.
Poetry of the West is poetry which must create such constructions. It cannot borrow its cultural frame from the world it invokes, it must create that frame itself. However, the frame it creates must not impose artificial limits on the West - it is an ordering device which has only chaos to work with. Thus a poem of the West must face the impossible task of standing - like the Manhattan sky-line - as a built object which provides a vocabulary by which to know a chaotic and incomprehensible world - a thing which stands between human consciousness and a world which does not lend itself to conscious understanding.
Thus, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry's narration comes pre-packaged by the stark lines of urbanity, while Passage to India must invent those lines. And in order that they be lines adequate to the world on which the poet imposes them, they must mirror the world's chaos exactly at that moment which they obscure it. Passage to India must provide the sky-line which Crossing Brooklyn Ferry may take for granted. The poem may at once be a "passage to you" and a technological epic because it conceives of itself as among those technologies organizing (and thereby making possible) human experience. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is a poem of integration and unity where the poet projects himself into the spectacularly visual landscape only to return and share the feelings with his fellow men and women. Integration is viewed paradoxically, by disintegration, for the sake of being part of the scheme.
In other words, one has to de-compact oneself in order to fit in the simple, compact, well-joined scheme. Simple and well-joined in their purpose of returning home are the crowds, who arouse genuine curiosity on the part of the poet. The costume-attired crowds become meaningful to Whitman in their crossing from shore to shore, to eternity (a hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them as they cross), they share with the poet the weakness, the doubt and the suspicion (The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? would not people laugh at me? ), and they partake with him the splendour of the moving images, the a temporal and a spacial harmony where I and you and they become we, where everyone assumes a role, the same old role in their quest for identity. Symbolically speaking, the river stands for the float forever held in solution from which identities are struck.
The land, the mast head Manhattan is likewise a symbol of identity; it is the place where the poet is tied to his fellow men and women, it is the place where he is fused into them and where his meaning is poured into them. Visually speaking, the images Whitman creates construct the flowing motion of the verses and they are the more so pervasive as they are enhanced by shared feeling (Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river, and the bright flow, I was refreshed). Stylistically speaking, the verses abound in parallelism- namely the parallel verbs used at the beginning of the lines (Flow on; Frolic on; Cross; Stand up; Sound out; Play; Live; ) which make the direct addressing both rhythmical and imperative- reiteration of ideas (the old role that is great or small, according as one makes it; you necessary film, continue to envelop the Soul), long enumeration, rich noun determination, and what Jannaccone calls the logical rime or the grammatical rhythm (Gay Allen): the repetition of parts of speech / grammatical constructions at certain places in the line (It avails not, neither time or place-distance avails not, I am with you, , I project myself- also I return-I am with you, and know how it is). The use of the pronoun is of utter importance since the pronoun is responsible for ultimately designating the sought-for identity. Thus, the I -which is not necessarily a person, but can be a personal image of the idealistic absolute (Lionel Trilling) -moves supply from the very beginning of the line to the last statement of the line (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 and then I too lived, (I was of old Brooklyn), I too walked the streets of Manhattan Island, ). The I is always in a face-to-face relation to You and towards the end of the poem they merge into We (We descend upon you and all things-we arrest you all, We realize the Soul only by you, ... ), while You is used to name the objects, the dumb beautiful ministers that achieve the Axis Mundi-like connection of Man with the Soul, with eternity.
Four of Whitman's most famous poems celebrate ferry boats, interstate railroads, and the Suez canal as symbolic and psychological forces in nineteenth-century America. In most of his other poems, Whitman's visions of his world are chiefly of people walking in cities and in the countryside, even though he writes about that world from mid-century to the last decade. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1856) presents visions of flags and sails, large and small steamers, the big steam-tug, and pilot boats in the harbor of "mast home'd Manhattan, " a harbor which displays the "flags of all nations. " The harbor is subject to the tides and currents and it is surrounded by the hills of Brooklyn with their foundries and chimneys. The ferry boat is both a vantage point and a refuge from the city. It carries crowds with their "usual costumes" from the city to their homes in the Brooklyn suburb, and it brings them together on the boat, furnishing "parts toward eternity" and "toward the soul. " The most significant 1856 poem is "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, " in which the poet vicariously joins his readers and all past and future ferry passengers. The two poems cover much of the same ground. Both celebrate new technologies; both involve passages; and both overflow with a deeply felt longing to connect with the reader.
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, however, seems to narrate what in Passage to India is a static moment - the "passage to you" which partially resolves the poems tensions. In Passage to India that address structure appears for a brief and fleeting moment, and the ambiguity of the address, which the poet seems to direct both to the reader and to his own soul, complicates it further. The passage is both between interior and exterior modes of existence as much as it is between the speaker of the poem and the individual reading it. This ambiguity is appropriate to the poem - mirroring the instability which (dis) organizes it throughout - but Crossing Brooklyn Ferry invokes a far more rigidly defined structure of address. The you is present throughout, and it refers explicitly to "men and women of... generations hence" (Whitman, 116).
Indeed the entire world that Crossing Brooklyn Ferry invokes is far more rigidly structured than that of Passage to India, and this I believe to be related to their difference in regional foci. Between these to poems exists an opposition which recreates Smiths argument in far more complex terms. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is linear and teleological (like the ferry trip itself). It invokes a lucid structure of address. It takes place not only in the east, but in perhaps the most completely built kind of environment of the nineteenth century - the urban metropolis. Even the East River, the sunset and the clouds overhead - among the few "natural" images which make their way into the poem - are framed by the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn or by the Manhattan skyline to the west.
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry thus inverts Passage to India's "natural"/"unnatural" dynamic, placing "nature" in the frame of "technology, " rather than - as in the case of the rail-road, placing technology in the frame of nature. The poems are telling us something about the meanings that were attached to American regions in the nineteenth century and about how those meaning may be understood and competing constructions of human interaction with a non-human world. If a built environment frames an un-built one than narration is possible because the world becomes one which lends itself to cognition via cultural constructions - a category to which both sky-scrapers and stories belong. Poetry of the East is thus poetry in which linear narration and direct address of the reader become possible.
Everything is in its place. Poetry of the West is poetry which must create such constructions. It cannot borrow its cultural frame from the world it invokes, it must create that frame itself. However, the frame it creates must not impose artificial limits on the West - it is an ordering device which has only chaos to work with. Thus a poem of the West must face the impossible task of standing - like the Manhattan sky-line - as a built object which provides a vocabulary by which to know a chaotic and incomprehensible world - a thing which stands between human consciousness and a world which does not lend itself to conscious understanding.
Thus, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry's narration comes pre-packaged by the stark lines of urbanity, while Passage to India must invent those lines. And in order that they be lines adequate to the world on which the poet imposes them, they must mirror the world's chaos exactly at that moment which they obscure it. Passage to India must provide the sky-line which Crossing Brooklyn Ferry may take for granted. The poem may at once be a "passage to you" and a technological epic because it conceives of itself as among those technologies organizing (and thereby making possible) human experience. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is a poem of integration and unity where the poet projects himself into the spectacularly visual landscape only to return and share the feelings with his fellow men and women. Integration is viewed paradoxically, by disintegration, for the sake of being part of the scheme.
In other words, one has to de-compact oneself in order to fit in the simple, compact, well-joined scheme. Simple and well-joined in their purpose of returning home are the crowds, who arouse genuine curiosity on the part of the poet. The costume-attired crowds become meaningful to Whitman in their crossing from shore to shore, to eternity (a hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them as they cross), they share with the poet the weakness, the doubt and the suspicion (The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? would not people laugh at me? ), and they partake with him the splendour of the moving images, the a temporal and a spacial harmony where I and you and they become we, where everyone assumes a role, the same old role in their quest for identity. Symbolically speaking, the river stands for the float forever held in solution from which identities are struck. The land, the mast head Manhattan is likewise a symbol of identity; it is the place where the poet is tied to his fellow men and women, it is the place where he is fused into them and where his meaning is poured into them.
Visually speaking, the images Whitman creates construct the flowing motion of the verses and they are the more so pervasive as they are enhanced by shared feeling (Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river, and the bright flow, I was refreshed). Stylistically speaking, the verses abound in parallelism- namely the parallel verbs used at the beginning of the lines (Flow on; Frolic on; Cross; Stand up; Sound out; Play; Live; ) which make the direct addressing both rhythmical and imperative- reiteration of ideas (the old role that is great or small, according as one makes it; you necessary film, continue to envelop the Soul), long enumeration, rich noun determination, and what Jannaccone calls the logical rime or the grammatical rhythm (Gay Allen): the repetition of parts of speech / grammatical constructions at certain places in the line (It avails not, neither time or place-distance avails not, I am with you, , I project myself- also I return-I am with you, and know how it is). The use of the pronoun is of utter importance since the pronoun is responsible for ultimately designating the sought-for identity. Thus, the I -which is not necessarily a person, but can be a personal image of the idealistic absolute (Lionel Trilling) -moves supply from the very beginning of the line to the last statement of the line (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 and then I too lived, (I was of old Brooklyn), I too walked the streets of Manhattan Island, ).
The I is always in a face-to-face relation to You and towards the end of the poem they merge into We (We descend upon you and all things-we arrest you all, We realize the Soul only by you, ... ), while You is used to name the objects, the dumb beautiful ministers that achieve the Axis Mundi-like connection of Man with the Soul, with eternity. Four of Whitman's most famous poems celebrate ferry boats, interstate railroads, and the Suez canal as symbolic and psychological forces in nineteenth-century America. In most of his other poems, Whitman's visions of his world are chiefly of people walking in cities and in the countryside, even though he writes about that world from mid-century to the last decade. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1856) presents visions of flags and sails, large and small steamers, the big steam-tug, and pilot boats in the harbor of "mast home'd Manhattan, " a harbor which displays the "flags of all nations. " The harbor is subject to the tides and currents and it is surrounded by the hills of Brooklyn with their foundries and chimneys. The ferry boat is both a vantage point and a refuge from the city. It carries crowds with their "usual costumes" from the city to their homes in the Brooklyn suburb, and it brings them together on the boat, furnishing "parts toward eternity" and "toward the soul. " The most significant 1856 poem is "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, " in which the poet vicariously joins his readers and all past and future ferry passengers. The two poems cover much of the same ground.
Both celebrate new technologies; both involve passages; and both overflow with a deeply felt longing to connect with the reader. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, however, seems to narrate what in Passage to India is a static moment - the "passage to you" which partially resolves the poems tensions. In Passage to India that address structure appears for a brief and fleeting moment, and the ambiguity of the address, which the poet seems to direct both to the reader and to his own soul, complicates it further. The passage is both between interior and exterior modes of existence as much as it is between the speaker of the poem and the individual reading it.
This ambiguity is appropriate to the poem - mirroring the instability which (dis) organizes it throughout - but Crossing Brooklyn Ferry invokes a far more rigidly defined structure of address. The you is present throughout, and it refers explicitly to "men and women of... generations hence" (Whitman, 116). Indeed the entire world that Crossing Brooklyn Ferry invokes is far more rigidly structured than that of Passage to India, and this I believe to be related to their difference in regional foci. Between these to poems exists an opposition which recreates Smiths argument in far more complex terms. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is linear and teleological (like the ferry trip itself).
It invokes a lucid structure of address. It takes place not only in the east, but in perhaps the most completely built kind of environment of the nineteenth century - the urban metropolis. Even the East River, the sunset and the clouds overhead - among the few "natural" images which make their way into the poem - are framed by the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn or by the Manhattan skyline to the west. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry thus inverts Passage to India's "natural"/"unnatural" dynamic, placing "nature" in the frame of "technology, " rather than - as in the case of the rail-road, placing technology in the frame of nature.
The poems are telling us something about the meanings that were attached to American regions in the nineteenth century and about how those meaning may be understood and competing constructions of human interaction with a non-human world. If a built environment frames an un-built one than narration is possible because the world becomes one which lends itself to cognition via cultural constructions - a category to which both sky-scrapers and stories belong. Poetry of the East is thus poetry in which linear narration and direct address of the reader become possible. Everything is in its place. Poetry of the West is poetry which must create such constructions. It cannot borrow its cultural frame from the world it invokes, it must create that frame itself.
However, the frame it creates must not impose artificial limits on the West - it is an ordering device which has only chaos to work with. Thus a poem of the West must face the impossible task of standing - like the Manhattan sky-line - as a built object which provides a vocabulary by which to know a chaotic and incomprehensible world - a thing which stands between human consciousness and a world which does not lend itself to conscious understanding. Thus, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry's narration comes pre-packaged by the stark lines of urbanity, while Passage to India must invent those lines. And in order that they be lines adequate to the world on which the poet imposes them, they must mirror the world's chaos exactly at that moment which they obscure it. Passage to India must provide the sky-line which Crossing Brooklyn Ferry may take for granted.
The poem may at once be a "passage to you" and a technological epic because it conceives of itself as among those technologies organizing (and thereby making possible) human experience. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is a poem of integration and unity where the poet projects himself into the spectacularly visual landscape only to return and share the feelings with his fellow men and women. Integration is viewed paradoxically, by disintegration, for the sake of being part of the scheme. In other words, one has to de-compact oneself in order to fit in the simple, compact, well-joined scheme. Simple and well-joined in their purpose of returning home are the crowds, who arouse genuine curiosity on the part of the poet.
The costume-attired crowds become meaningful to Whitman in their crossing from shore to shore, to eternity (a hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them as they cross), they share with the poet the weakness, the doubt and the suspicion (The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? would not people laugh at me? ), and they partake with him the splendour of the moving images, the a temporal and a spacial harmony where I and you and they become we, where everyone assumes a role, the same old role in their quest for identity. Symbolically speaking, the river stands for the float forever held in solution from which identities are struck. The land, the mast head Manhattan is likewise a symbol of identity; it is the place where the poet is tied to his fellow men and women, it is the place where he is fused into them and where his meaning is poured into them. Visually speaking, the images Whitman creates construct the flowing motion of the verses and they are the more so pervasive as they are enhanced by shared feeling (Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river, and the bright flow, I was refreshed). Stylistically speaking, the verses abound in parallelism- namely the parallel verbs used at the beginning of the lines (Flow on; Frolic on; Cross; Stand up; Sound out; Play; Live; ) which make the direct addressing both rhythmical and imperative- reiteration of ideas (the old role that is great or small, according as one makes it; you necessary film, continue to envelop the Soul), long enumeration, rich noun determination, and what Jannaccone calls the logical rime or the grammatical rhythm (Gay Allen): the repetition of parts of speech / grammatical constructions at certain places in the line (It avails not, neither time or place-distance avails not, I am with you, , I project myself- also I return-I am with you, and know how it is).
The use of the pronoun is of utter importance since the pronoun is responsible for ultimately designating the sought-for identity. Thus, the I -which is not necessarily a person, but can be a personal image of the idealistic absolute (Lionel Trilling) -moves supply from the very beginning of the line to the last statement of the line (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 and then I too lived, (I was of old Brooklyn), I too walked the streets of Manhattan Island, ). The I is always in a face-to-face relation to You and towards the end of the poem they merge into We (We descend upon you and all things-we arrest you all, We realize the Soul only by you, ... ), while You is used to name the objects, the dumb beautiful ministers that achieve the Axis Mundi-like connection of Man with the Soul, with eternity. Four of Whitman's most famous poems celebrate ferry boats, interstate railroads, and the Suez canal as symbolic and psychological forces in nineteenth-century America.
In most of his other poems, Whitman's visions of his world are chiefly of people walking in cities and in the countryside, even though he writes about that world from mid-century to the last decade. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1856) presents visions of flags and sails, large and small steamers, the big steam-tug, and pilot boats in the harbor of "mast home'd Manhattan, " a harbor which displays the "flags of all nations. " The harbor is subject to the tides and currents and it is surrounded by the hills of Brooklyn with their foundries and chimneys. The ferry boat is both a vantage point and a refuge from the city. It carries crowds with their "usual costumes" from the city to their homes in the Brooklyn suburb, and it brings them together on the boat, furnishing "parts toward eternity" and "toward the soul. " The most significant 1856 poem is "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, " in which the poet vicariously joins his readers and all past and future ferry passengers. Bibliography:
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Research essay sample on Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Suez Canal
