Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Walt Whitman "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"
1856/1881
- Encompassing all of societies views
- Links to Coleridge
- Concerned with shared experiences & abilities to transcend barriers of space, morality &
generations
- Whitman regarded as "Emerson's poet" but the links to Coleridge suggest that he is going against Emerson's theories voiced in "The American Scholar"
- Repetition & Anaphora
- Specifically in sections 1 & 2
- "The"/"Others"/"Just"/"Saw"/"Look'd"
- Mirrors the theme of constant revisiting & the possibility of continuity within humanity based on common experiences
- Revisiting as an action which encompasses all humanity
- "Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore.../Fifty years
hence, others will see them as they cross..."
- Borad suggestion that all of humanity has the same perspective
- "A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them"
- Timelessness of journey
- Vision & Perspective
- "It avails not, time nor place-distance avails not"
- Use of the physical to establish
identity
- "I too had receiv'd identity by my body,/ that I was I knew was of my body, and
what I should be I knew I should/ be of my body
- No differentiation between physical/man-made and nature
- Similarities in descriptions
- "Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, i/was refresh'd"
- "Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I/stood yet was hurried"
- "Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm'd/pipes of steamboats, I look'd"
- Disruption of continual experience by history & development