After reading Crossing Brooklyn Ferry by the poet Walt Whitman, I can’t help but feel like it is a love letter.  When I say love letter I don’t mean in the traditional sense, but I feel that it is a love letter to future generations.  The speaker starts out describing his ferry ride, the “flood-tide” the “clouds of the west”, the “sun there half an hour high” and then slowly begins to talk to the people of his city, present and future generations included.  Symbolically, as he travels across the water, moving from one shore to the next, he travels across time.  He reaches out to his future readers, to the future inhabitants of his beloved city, and he draws comparisons between his life and theirs’.  He notes that they will see the same things on their ferry rides, that he sees on his. The speaker says, “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…” and he points out that even though there may be hundreds of years between him and his prospective reader, that time and distance make no difference.

In addition to sharing his city and love, I find it interesting that the speaker also notes that his reader will share his negative attributes as well.  In stanza 6, the speaker writes, “It is not upon you alone that the dark patches fall…” and “Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil…”.  Through this the speaker moves past what it means to share his city, and broadens the topic to examine what it means to be human and share humanity.  In this sense, acknowledging the humanness of his reader, he connects with his reader, almost as if he is reaching the other shore.  This poem, at face value is about one person’s story about their life, but upon further examination, it is a story about life itself, told from one very specific corner of the universe.

P.S. I can draw a text to text connection between this poem and the song, I was here by Beyonce. The lyrics are, “I was here, I lived, I loved. I was here, I did, I’ve done, everything that I wanted and it was more than I thought it would be…I will leave my mark so everyone will know”

~Naomi