Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Whitman takes the simplest and most available urban construct—a ferry boat taking hordes of unmotivated passengers from Manhattan back to Brooklyn, and offers a daring argument: He and his fellow passengers are in this together, bound together in a single resplendent energy field: “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt” (Line 22). The intimacy the speaker offers is not the superficial kind of love assumed between people. Rather, he offers a vision of a singleness of all organic matter, a commonness that is blood-deep, what he terms in his essays as consanguinity, a term Whitman, ever the autodidact, borrowed from the nascent science of evolution to denote how at our most basic level, we are the same, expressions of a grand organic one-ness.

Nearly a century before genetics would catch up to Whitman’s complex vision, Whitman perceived (and celebrated with gusto) the reality of humanity’s unity, how despite the obvious and distracting differences, human beings are manifestations of a single radiant energy. Even as we keep our distance, even as we provoke isolation and embrace ego, the world itself begs to differ. Whitman would hardly be surprised when cutting-edge genetics in the mid-20th century first suggested that all organic matter was made up of the elaborate variations of four nucleotides, that all living matter from the bacterial mold on a shower curtain to the president of the United States was made up of adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine.