MPRP Episode 17, Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
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“Crossing” says nothing about the poet’s reason for crossing the river; the focus is not on a purpose or destination but on the act of crossing itself and the surrounding spectacle: the water, the people, the sun going down, the boats and docks and city in the distance. The poem describes the daily experience of a mid-nineteenth-century New York ferry-rider, mundane enough to most but glorious to Whitman. At the same time it makes the trip the basis for a profound meditation on time and flux and how we exist both within and outside them.