From Anxiety to Power: Grammar and Crisis in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

From Anxiety to Power: Grammar and Crisis in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"Author(s): Roger GilbertSource: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Dec., 1987), pp. 339-361Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045267 .

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From Anxiety to Power: Grammar and Crisis in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" ROGER GILBERT

All "It was" is a fragment, a riddle, a fearful chance-until the creating Will saith thereto: "But thus would I have it."-

Until the creating Will saith thereto: "But thus do I will it! Thus shall I will it!"

-Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Q$U P E R F I C I A L L Y, "Crossing Brook- lyn Ferry" does not resemble a crisis

poem, to use Harold Bloom's term for a lyric that builds on and works through deep anxieties; indeed, it is one of Whitman's most overtly cheerful poems. The terrible scenes of violence and suf- fering that cast a pall over the middle sections of "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers," the elegiac sorrow that haunts "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and "When Lilacs Last in the Door- yard Bloom'd," the sexual anguish of the "Calamus" poems-all these negative elements seem to be absent here. Most significantly, death-always the major specter shadowing Whitman, despite his determinedly casual dismissals or passionate avowals of his own mortality-seems prominently missing from the poem.

Yet though Whitman never speaks directly of death, I nevertheless want to suggest that "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is in fact one of his most sustained, difficult, and finally triumphant con- frontations with the knowledge of his own death, a confrontation

C 1987 by The Regents of the University of California

339



340 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

that bears the marks of a genuine poetic crisis. Such a reading represents a considerable divergence from more conventional in- terpretations of the poem, which tend to see it as an extended celebration of perception, the material world, and the sheer de- lights of physical existence, leading to an Eliotic sense of timelessness within time.' And indeed it is true that Whitman's tone

'Edwin Haviland Miller, for example, claims that the poem is a "sustained hymn to joy-the joy of the sensuous body.... the poet does not venture into the psychic depths of 'The Sleepers' or 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking'" (Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey [New York: New York Univ. Press, 1968], p. 199). Other readers of the poem place less emphasis on the poem's celebration of bodily existence, and focus instead on Whitman's "imaginative fusion" with the reader; see, for example, James E. Miller, Jr., A Critical Guide to "Leaves of Grass" (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 80-89; E. Fred Carlisle, The Uncertain Self. Whitman's Drama of Identity (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 59-66; Howard J. Waskow, Whitman: Explorations in Form (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966); Paul A. Orlov, "On Time and Form in Whitman's 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,'" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 2 (1984), 12-21; and James W. Gargano, "Technique in 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry': The Everlasting Moment," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 62 (1963), 262-69. All of these readings share a sense of the poem as celebratory through and through, rather than as moving towards celebration only by way of crisis, through a prolonged confrontation with anxiety.

More recently, however, this aspect of the poem has begun to be recognized more clearly; see the brief remarks on the poem by Regis Durand in his "'A New Rhythmus Fitted for Thee': On Some Discursive Strategies in Whitman's Poetry," North Dakota Quarterly, 51 (1983), 48-56, and, more germane to my own inter- pretation, Richard Pascal's essay" 'What Is It Then Between Us?': 'Crossing Brook- lyn Ferry' as Dramatic Meditation," in 1980: "Leaves of Grass" at 125: Eight Essays, ed. William White (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 59-70. Pascal clearly sees the uniqueness of the poem in its engagement of Whitman's anxiety at the thought of death: "the suspicion that mortality is fatal naggingly recurs through much of his poetry, and in the bravado of his reassurances he can seem to protest too much. It is only in the extraordinary 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' that the anxiety behind the bravado is acknowledged and powerfully dramatized." In his reading Pascal emphasizes the poem's dramatic quality, its depiction of "a mind, a human soul, passionately seeking a way of coping with perplexity and despair" (p. 60). I accept this view of the poem entirely, attempting only to root it more firmly in the grammatical modes through which the inward drama is enacted.

Perhaps the fullest and most impressive reading of the poem is that of Quentin Anderson in his The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), pp. 119-65, where he approaches the poem from a phenomenological and mythological perspective, and discovers Whitman in the role of shaman or magician. Anderson anticipates several of my points, albeit from a less formalistic point of view. He shares my sense of the poem as deeply dynamic in character: "This is the only Whitman poem in which the movement from one form of consciousness to another is operative within the poem; is



"CROSSING BROOKLYN FERRY" 341

remains resolutely ebullient from beginning to end. Yet death is a ubiquitous and inescapable presence throughout the poem, find- ing covert expression in various figurative and allusive details, but being represented most saliently by language itself, and specifically by the grammatical modes that articulate the poem's major movements. In other words, death takes on a purely linguistic guise in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," a guise I would identify with writing and its semantic avatar constative language, which act as verbal embodiments of death through the silence and fixity of the page. Theorists like Derrida and Blanchot have taught us to see the deathliness of all writing; conversely speech, particularly in the active mode J. L. Austin calls performative utterance, returns us always to an originating life-force exerting its will in and through language.2

Whitman's struggle with death is thus figured in the poem as a struggle with writing, and more importantly a struggle to cross out of writing and into speech, into a form of language associated with life and power, not death and absence. We should recall that the etymological root of the word "crisis" means crossing; and, as

in fact the structural hinge of the poem itself" (p. 122). We differ, however, as to where precisely this hinge is located; Anderson emphasizes the pivotal character of section 6, in which Whitman both admits and leaves behind a mode of consciousness defined by guilt, while I am more interested in the poem's grammatical modulations as they reflect the poet's temporal anxieties.

21 should state that among the theoretical assumptions which underlie my reading of the poem are, first, a conviction that speech and writing are important tropes for Whitman, not simply as topics but as rhetorical modes. Although in a literal sense his poems are of course thoroughly written, they generally employ an idiom that claims for itself many of the attributes of speech. C. Carroll Hollis has per- ceptively analyzed the "oratorical impulse" behind Whitman's poetry in Language and Style in "Leaves of Grass" (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1983); I would add that Whitman's attempt to create the illusion of spoken language within a written medium is closely connected to his ongoing effort to assert his unmediated presence to the reader. My second major assumption, related to the first, is that the speech/writing opposition may be coordinated with J. L. Austin's opposition between performative and constative language (How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. 0. Urmson and Marina Sbisa', 2nd ed. [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975]). Although Austin himself does not make this move, I would argue that the temporal nature of speech intimately allies it with action, and that conversely a written text can never be said to perform an act, only to commemorate or record one. On the whole subject of illocutionary force and performative language in Whitman, see Hollis, Language and Style, pp. 65-123.




many commentators have noted, Whitman clearly intends the motif of crossing announced in his title in a more than literal sense. The peculiar construction of the title phrase, with its lack of any coordinating preposition, foregrounds the first word and so hints at its importance. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is a crisis poem, then, insofar as its form is determined by psychic need, by an urgent impulse to overcome the deathliness of writing and to return to the spoken idiom that is Whitman's truest mode. This willed movement from writing to speech constitutes the poem's deepest "crossing," carrying the poet from a paralyzing submission in the face of death to a renewed sense of his own power over the object- world.

The poem opens in an unmistakably oral mode, as Whitman audaciously addresses his natural surroundings:

Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! Clouds of the west-sun there half an hour high-I see you

also face to face.'

The use of the second person pronoun to denote a specific entity is most legitimate in a speech situation, where addresser and addressee are simultaneously present to one another. The dynamics of address, dialogue, and apostrophe inform much of this poem; and in reading it we must alert ourselves to the shifting reference and force of Whitman's use of "you," for it is by no means constant. Here the "you" signals a bold personification of the inani- mate object-world of sky and river, which in a rather startling catachresis are seen "face to face." Verb tense is as significant an element in the poem as the person of pronouns; "I see you" is an utterance that establishes an absolute, autonomous present, neither the continuous present of "I am seeing you," nor the past present of "I saw you." Such a usage almost never occurs in ordinary language; and when it does it is usually under special cir- cumstances, for example in games, where it takes on a definite

3Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 159. I have used as my text Whitman's final revision of the poem as it appeared in the 1881 Leaves of Grass, which is generally agreed to be superior to earlier versions. Further quo- tations of Whitman's poetry are from this edition and are cited in the text by page or line number.




illocutionary function. As Austin observes, this particular type of grammatical construction is peculiar to explicit performatives- e.g., "I order you," "I promise you," "I pronounce you," etc. since only in such self-referential phrases can the utterance and the action it names be considered absolutely simultaneous and coextensive, constituting a pure grammatical present.4

But of course "see" is not strictly speaking a performative verb, since it denotes an involuntary process rather than a willed action. Whitman's use of an illocutionary framework to convey what is technically a constative meaning, namely that he is (or more properly was) perceiving certain phenomena at a particular moment, hints at one of the basic rhetorical strategies of his poetry. This strategy consists of the deliberate transformation of knowledge or influx into act or discharge, thereby establishing a form of solipsistic mastery over the deathly world of objects and sensations. The most famous instance is undoubtedly this passage from "Song of Myself":

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me. (p. 54)

The cognitive reception of phenomena, these lines imply, ultimately leads to death; only when phenomena are recast in a performative mode, as the product of the poet's own will, can death be evaded or repressed. Whitman's "I see you," again an address to the sun, his grandest nemesis, is a much subtler form of the same gesture, insofar as the phrase grammatically evokes a kind of aggressive intentionality missing from the perception itself, thus seeming to place Whitman in control of what is really as involuntary and inexorable a process as that of death.

Why does Whitman personify the object-world, by his repeated use of the peculiar phrase "face to face"? The answer is suggested by the next line: "Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!" (1. 3). If objects have become people, people in turn have become objects, es- tranged, incommunicative beings whose very otherness serves as a reminder of Whitman's own finitude. While objects passively

4Austin, How to Do Things with Words, pp. 45-47. See also Hollis' valuable dis- cussion of the "lyric present" in Whitman (Language and Style, pp. 83-88).




allow themselves to be addressed and so mastered by Whitman, the other passengers undermine his solipsistic sense of godhood, bringing home the painful fact that he, like them, is a finite being inhabiting the objective world of limitation and death. In "Song of Myself" others feed Whitman's own ego by allowing themselves to be omnivorously incorporated ("And of these one and all I weave the song of myself" [1. 329]); here, however, they remain ineffably "curious" or, precisely, other, refusing to be so readily assimilated or devoured. One reason for this difference between the two poems is that in "Song of Myself" the others with whom Whitman identifies are not depicted as present at the moment of utterance; because "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" seems to insist on a total coincidence of utterance and occasion, others take on a disturbingly literal presence that militates against imaginative identification.

The temporal element that will come to play so large a role in this poem enters at the end of the first section:

On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose. (11. 4-5)

What is the identity of the "you" in these two lines? We have only to examine the sentence's syntax to realize that Whitman is now no longer addressing the "crowds of men and women" to whom he had previously exclaimed "How curious you are to me!" Here the "you" of the first line cannot grammatically refer to "the hundreds that cross"; and it is not until the next line that we are given its referent, namely the future commuters who figure so prominently in Whitman's meditations. I would suggest that Whit- man's obsessive concern with futurity in the poem grows out of his fear of death, and his desire to forge a continuity between present and future that will elide mortality through the mediation of poetry. The "you," then, can only be an address to Whitman's anticipated readers, upon whom the task of recovering the poet's textualized presence must eventually fall.

The second section of the poem serves as a transition from the aggressively oral mode of the opening lines to the passive




written mode that coincides with Whitman's buried intimations of mortality in the middle sections. The first stanza or verse paragraph of this section at first glance seems a typically exuberant Whitmanian catalogue; yet in its sequence of images it registers a subtle movement towards death:

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,

The simple, compact, well-join'd scheme, myselfdisintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,

The similitudes of the past and those of the future, The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings,

on the walk in the street and the passage over the river, The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far way, The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

(11. 6-12)

The first two lines depose the self from its initial position of centrality, as Whitman is metamorphosed from a ravenous "me" or ego sustained by everything around him to a "disintegrated" fragment that is no longer essential to the "well-join'd scheme" of the object-world. His poetic authority is further diffused as passive perception takes the place of active will. "The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings," though outwardly a celebration of the fugitive beauties to be found in ordinary perception, points to a subtle but threatening displacement of the self from performative agent to cognitive receptor. As I have suggested, Whitman is rarely content simply to record perception in the manner of, say, Thoreau; by means of a strongly performative rhetoric and grammar, he invariably assumes authority for his per- ceptions, presenting them as products of the poetic will. As the passage on the sunrise in "Song of Myself" shows, this impulse is profoundly related to his fear of death, which he associates with a passive subjugation to the object-world. Such passiveness in fact appears to be taking hold of Whitman here, and it is important to recognize how uncharacteristic this stance is for him.

The next line, "The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away," seems literally to be a description of the ferry ride, but its diction has a darker ring that is probably borrowed from the close of Shelley's "Adonais": "I am borne darkly, fear-




fully, afar." The rushing movement of the current, inevitably a figure for temporality, carries Whitman not toward but, more sin- isterly, "away," hinting at his eventual disappearance from the scene. This new focus on the temporal initiates a turn from object to subject or thing to other, returning Whitman to the problematic confrontation with other selves. "The others that are to follow me," for all its prophetic gusto, can be taken as a thinly veiled reference to his own finitude; and his insistence on "the ties between me and them" only confirms their temporal separation. We can translate the next phrase, "the certainty of others," as quite simply the certainty of death, a certainty that even the vitality of the final string of nouns cannot counteract.

In the second half of the section Whitman attempts to re- affirm his waning authority by striking an openly prophetic stance; but the assertion that "others will watch the run of the flood-tide" (1. 14), despite its affirmative tone, is a weak and un- satisfying gesture, since it fails to reconcile otherness with the self and so merely underscores his temporal predicament. The wall of death that separates the poet from his future audience becomes altogether visible in the next lines:

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide. (11. 17-19)

Whitman is thirty-seven years old when he writes these lines, and even with the most generous of allowances he surely realizes that "Fifty years hence" marks the farthest limit of his natural life span. The leap in the next line to "A hundred years hence" thus constitutes a definitive transgression of the boundary of death, one that "or ever so many hundred years hence" merely magnifies.5 In the final line of the section the consciousness of death is directly figured by the images of the sunset and the "falling-back to the

5Commenting on these lines, Richard Pascal writes " 'Others-others-others': The constant repetition of that word cannot but suggest the speaker's preoccu- pation with, and underlying anxiety about, his own future absence from the scene" ("What Is It Then Between Us," p. 63).




sea of the ebb-tide." We should remind ourselves that the entire poem, like that eerie death or dissolution scene at the close of "Song of Myself," takes place at sunset (indeed it was originally entitled "Sun-Down Poem"), a fact that is not absolutely clear until this point, since "the sun half an hour high" might just as easily be rising.

Death has slowly been infiltrating Whitman's voice in the second section, contaminating his apparently jubilant rhetoric and imagery, and draining him of the performative vigor manifested in the opening lines. With the third, section, the poem's initial crossing from speech to writing, and by extension from life to death, is fully negotiated. The section opens with a grandiose af- firmation of presence and the power of poetic utterance, bridging the expanse of space and time by sheer fiat:

It avails not, time nor place-distance avails not, 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,... (11. 20-22)

"I am with you" seems to be an open declaration of immortality, of a presence that transcends all temporal and spatial limitations. But between the second and third lines of the section Whitman undergoes a dramatic loss of presence and will. We can almost feel his confidence in the projective power of his voice evaporate in the abrupt shift from present to past tense that begins with the words "I felt." The pseudo-performative construction "I see you" that began the poem now gives way to a purely constative mode that accepts the conditions of absence and distance imposed by language in its written form. Whitman's central poetic project is the capturing and preserving of an originary voice or presence within the trace-system of textuality. He explicitly announces this ideal in a memorable passage from the closing poem of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, appropriately titled "So Long!":

Camerado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man, (Is it night? are we here together alone?)




It is I you hold and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms-decease calls me forth.

(11. 53-57)

Here, however, he seems to abandon that impossible project, accepting the inherent limitations of writing and, by extension, of mortality. Whitman very rarely expresses himself in the past tense, and his use of it here may well surprise readers versed in Leaves of Grass. To say (or more accurately write) "I felt" is to acknowl- edge one's temporal finitude, the dismaying fact that a time will come when one no longer feels anything at all. This is especially true here, because the actions Whitman describes are habitual ones that he will presumably continue long after the poem has been written; hence the past tense does not represent a moment that is already historical for the poet himself, but an ongoing present that will only become a past after he is dead. In a real sense, then, Whitman's use of the past tense constitutes a submission to his own death, a tacit recognition of the fact that his poem will outlive him.6

Whitman makes use of the full parallel construction "Just as you [present participle], so I [past participle]" five times in all, each time bringing himself closer to a stark awareness of mortality. The last two of these clauses are perhaps the most telling:

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. (11. 25-26)

6The implied relation between the use of the past tense and the poet's own death has been recognized by Mark Kinkead-Weekes ("Walt Whitman Passes the Full-Stop By. . . ," in An English Miscellany: Presented to W. S. Mackie, ed. Brian S. Lee [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977], p. 176) and by Quentin Anderson: "After the fourth of the nine sections of the poem the verbs change, and the writer is no longer in the poem's present tense.... It is after this 'death' that he asks whether he has succeeded in fusing his meaning into the person with whom he is trying to communicate" (The Imperial Self, p. 122). Anderson does not, however, view this death as a source of anxiety, instead claiming that it in fact rein- forces the "timelessness" Whitman wishes to convey. I myself prefer to see Whit- man's adoption of the past tense not as a symbolic enactment of death, but as a buried recognition of death, one that precipitates both the poem's psychological crisis and its grammatical crossing.



"CROSSING BROOKLYN FERRY 1 349

The return of the current imagery only serves to accentuate Whit- man's oppressive sense of temporality, the knowledge that even as he leans and loafs at his ease he is being hurried "darkly, fear- fully afar," toward death. The last line introduces the motif of seeing and looking (the two are subtly differentiated) that will dominate the remainder of the section. Seen in the context of Whitman's usual poetic stance, that last "I look'd" represents a major surrender of power; it appears to be his ultimate self- effacement, the most reductive version of himself he can possibly offer. If his strongest utterance and self-definition, even more than the Coleridgean "I AM," is the poetic speech act par excellence, namely "I sing myself," in which voice acts as an expansive synecdoche for spirit and presence, then "I look'd" can only represent the opposite extreme, in which the I becomes a passive blank or absence forever vanishing into anteriority, lacking even the most minimal of creative, assertive abilities, the ability to "see" what is looked upon and so to master it. (One might find an an- alogue to this kind of passive looking in the line from Coleridge's "Dejection": "And still I gaze-and with how blank an eye!")

The linked oppositions between speech and writing, performance and cognition, present and past tenses, and ultimately between life and death are thus further elaborated by the opposition between sound and sight on which Whitman's eventual recovery of voice will turn. In section 3 sight completely usurps hearing, and while the interplay between "watched," "saw," "had my eyes dazzled by," and "look'd" may indicate some fluctuation in the aggressiveness of Whitman's vision, he remains essentially a powerless onlooker, enslaved by the literality of the eye, which Wordsworth called "the most despotic of our senses."7 The visual details that Whitman records here, the sea-gulls, sunlit water, sail- ors, flags, "scallop-edg'd waves," and so on, take the form of no- tated phenomena in this section, perceptual data set down on the page in a purely written, constative fashion that implicitly acknowledges the poet's absence from his own text.

Indeed at a grammatical level Whitman quite literally disappears from the second verse paragraph. The pronoun "I" occurs

7William Wordsworth, The Prelude: A Parallel Text, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Har- mondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 475.




only once at the beginning; the subject clause is then reduced to a series of anaphoric verbs-"saw," "look'd," and so forth-and is finally excised altogether beginning at line 39, leaving a string of object clauses without any subjective antecedent. This disappearance of the subject can be seen as a kind of grammatical death, proleptically acting out the historical death that is to in- tervene between the poet and his projected readers. For all its sensual beauty, then, this catalogue of images is saturated in the knowledge of death, candidly accepting its status as a series of written traces commemorating moments of a life that will have come to an end by the time the poem is read. Whitman's poem was of course read during his lifetime; but in explicitly addressing itself to an audience located at least fifty years in the future, it seems to make the death of the poet an essential condition of the poem's own self-presentation.

The question of affect is especially difficult to determine here. As I have noted, Whitman's surface tone remains celebratory throughout the poem; yet we know from elsewhere in his oeuvre that the knowledge of death is deeply unsettling to him, since it calls into question the sense of his own immensity that lies at the source of his poetic power. What makes "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" so uniquely challenging among Whitman's poems is the way grammar functions as its primary carrier of psychic meaning or affect.8 We can perhaps go so far as to say that the grammar of the poem is its unconscious, structurally manifesting a subliminal anxiety that Whitman's overt rhetoric strives to repress. Part of

8Mutlu Konuk Blasing attaches a similar importance to grammatical structures in her reading of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" ("Whitman's 'Lilacs' and the Grammars of Time," PMLA, 97 [1982], 31-39). In that poem, however, Blasing sees a somewhat different relationship between the poem's meaning or affect and its grammar; rather than expressing what the poem's overt rhetoric denies-which in my reading is the function grammar plays in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," at least until the closing sections-grammar in "Lilacs" represents the con- stricting forces of convention and temporality, forces which are only overcome in the grammatically open-ended infinitive clause and dependent list with which the poem ends (the lines beginning "Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night. . ."). While the grammatical and temporal modes that Blasing identifies in "Lilacs" are also present in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," their meaning in that poem is radically different. This is because death is not an openly acknowledged presence in the poem, as it is in "Lilacs," but rather a subterranean awareness exerting a kind of gravitational pull on the poem's outwardly buoyant rhetoric.




this work of repression involves the elaborate and aesthetically charged cataloguing of phenomena carried out in section 3. In setting down so many of the particulars of the scene Whitman limits his attention to empirical facts, and so fends off the more threatening ontological fact of his own mortality. That fact is covertly expressed in the grammar that frames the catalogue, however, and so remains a powerful presence, sapping the poet of his usual first-person immediacy and vocal resonance. Few other pas- sages by Whitman contain so little dramatic inflection, so little sense of a living voice moving beneath the written words. The peculiarly written quality of section 3 thus can serve as an index to the poet's psychic state, revealing the degree to which he has become alienated from both his voice and his will.

In the fourth section Whitman restates the temporal predicament that burdens his imagination, this time however in a more affirmative register:

These and all else were to me the same as they are to you, I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river, The men and women I saw were all near to me, Others the same-others who look back on me because I look'd

forward to them, (The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)

(11. 49-53)

Seeing and looking now give way to loving, a verb that, while it remains in the past tense and therefore in a written rather than spoken idiom, nevertheless carries with it great therapeutic power. Suddenly otherness becomes less threatening to Whitman; compare the grammar of "saw aboard those that were near to me" in section 3 and "The men and women I saw were all near to me" in section 4, and observe the profound change of affect wrought by Whitman's simple variation. The impersonal "those" now becomes the more human "men and women," but even more tell- ingly "were near to me" moves from the subordinate to the pred- icate, while 'I saw" shifts from subject to subordinate, thus dramatizing a transition from the distance imposed by seeing to the immanence attained through the pathos of love.

In the next line a solution to Whitman's temporal dilemma begins to emerge, in which others no longer pose a threat to the




self but instead provide a means for its extension beyond its natural limits. Whitman's anxious anticipation of the others who will follow him and so confirm his own absence is now balanced and negated by the retrospection of "others who look back on me because I look'd forward to them." In effect the rushing currents of time are abruptly reversed, and the opposed vectors cancel each other, leaving only a suspended calm, a "float forever held in solution" (1. 62) in which Whitman no longer feels himself hurried toward death. The others who look back on Whitman are, of course, none other than his future readers, whose sense of em- pathic connection with the poet is strong enough to overcome their temporal separation from him.9 Significantly, Whitman returns in the next line to the present tense, as though the distance previously acknowledged by the past tense had ceased to exist. This prophecy of a future union between poet and reader ("The time will come"), coupled with the more casual "I stop here to- day and to-night," inevitably recalls the closing line of "Song of Myself," perhaps Whitman's strongest moment: "I stop some- where waiting for you." The fact that this present tense utterance is set off by parentheses, however, suggests that it only marks a momentary reversion, not a real shift in the poem's deep grammar.

In section 5 Whitman introduces a new grammatical construction that will eventually serve as a crucial transition between writing and speech:

What is it then between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

(11. 54-55)

Once again Whitman implicitly denies the reality of time as a bar- rier between poet and reader; but more important than the overt

9Compare these lines from "Starting from Paumanok": See, projected through time, For me an audience interminable.

With firm and regular step they wend, they never stop, Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions, One generation playing its part and passing on, Another generation playing its part and passing on in its turn, With faces turn'd sideways or backwards towards me to listen, With eyes retrospective towards me. (pp. 16-17)



C ROSSING BROOKLYN FERRY" 353

sense of these lines is the fact that they are framed as questions. Whitman's use of the rhetorical question here foreshadows the magnificent chain of them in section 8 that precedes his final crossing into utterance. For the time being, however, he lapses back into the past tense and the silence of writing. Now the ex- periences he records are neither lookings nor lovings, but the very process of psychic disturbance and defense that the poem itself has been covertly enacting: "I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me" (1. 59). These questionings express the same sense of estrangement that made the other passengers "curious" in section 1, sudden dislocations of the ordinary that point up the self's precarious place in the world. The section ends with a recognition of the self's bodily nature: "That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body" (1. 64). Whitman comes very close here to a discursive acknowledgement of his own mortality. In effect the knowledge of death moves out of the poem's grammatical unconscious and onto its surface, where it can be fully mastered and contained.

Section 6 continues to represent Whitman's anxieties directly, thereby permitting him to exorcise them:

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw its patches down upon me also, The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in

reality meagre? (11. 65-68)

By figuring his recurrent doubts and anxieties as "dark patches" Whitman reduces them to mere surface eccentricities; and in doing so he effectively removes their authority as privileged moments of lucidity, representing them instead as patches or cov- erings that obscure the self. This characterization of anxiety as a form of blindness rather than a mode of knowledge-specifically the knowledge of death-is a decisive factor in enabling Whitman to regain his former strength of will. The catalogue of apparently shameful vices that follows in fact signals a return to the con- nectedness of human relations. Like love, sexual desire provides a potent imaginative link with "others," a link that preserves the solipsistic centrality of the self while at the same time incorpo- rating otherness as a necessary element of the ego. The mere




contiguity that connected Whitman with others earlier in the poem ("saw those that were near me.. .") is now replaced by a more essential relationship of organic identity: he "was one with the rest," "lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping.. ." (11. 78, 82).

The line that most definitively announces Whitman's new, confident acceptance of otherness also signals a transition from seeing to hearing-a sensory movement that Harold Bloom has identified as a crucial mark of a poem's deeper rhetorical "crossing"l?:

Was call'd by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,

Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat.... (11. 79-80)

To hear one's name spoken by another is perhaps the purest experience of intersubjectivity, and its regenerative effect on Whit- man here undoes the disturbing estrangement that occurred at the opening of the poem, returning him to the world of human relationships and actions. He concludes section 6 with his version of a classic Shakespearean topos, the self as actor, which quite explicitly restores a performative or dramatic dimension to the poem:

Play'd the part that still looks back on the actor or actress, The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great

as we like, Or as small as we like, or both great and small. (11. 83-85)

Section 7 is the locus of Whitman's actual crossing from writing into speech; it is here that he abandons the past tense once and for all, and modulates the poem's grammar back into the transitional mode of rhetorical questioning:

Closer yet I approach you, What thought you have of me now, I had as much of

'0Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), p. 404.



"CROSSING BROOKLYN FERRY" 355 you-I laid in my stores in advance,

I considered long and seriously of you before you were born.

Who was to know what should come home to me? Who knows but I am enjoying this? Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking

at you now, for all you cannot see me? (11. 86-91)

With the first line of the section Whitman reverts to the quasi- performative mode of a line like "I see you face to face." Again the use of the present tense generates a certain illocutionary force even though the verb is not strictly speaking performative; we feel that in saying "I approach you," Whitman in fact does approach. The next two lines recapitulate the synthesis of prolepsis and retrospection that suspended time in section 4, but this time with an added weight of intentionality that places Whitman in full control of the process. His proleptic meditations now become a means whereby he projects himself into the future as a voice or spirit that transcends the trace-system of writing. (The original version of the poem contained the line "I project myself a moment to tell you-also I return""; but while this accurately describes the proleptic cast of his rhetoric, it makes the mechanism too explicit, and he wisely omitted it from later versions.)

The three questions that close the section propel Whitman even closer to the reader. Now he represents himself not as absent from the scene but as the "home" or center to which all else must return. Even more significant is the shift from past to present tense in the formulation of the second question: "Who was to know" becomes "Who knows," and the effect is a dramatic heightening in the temporal immediacy of the speaker's voice. The final line of the section is undoubtedly the most uncanny and startling in the entire poem. Suddenly Whitman is with us, in- specting us, leaping from the prison of the page to confront us in all his bodily immanence. No longer does his grammar pre- suppose death and absence; he is quite openly declaring himself immortal. True, he frames the line as a question, leaving open the possibility that he is not looking at us; but clearly it is the

"Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1860, facsimile of 1860 text, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1961), p. 382.




positive reading that is being elicited. Such a line can only be regarded as a rhetorical action, designed to issue in power rather than truth. As statement it is highly suspect, but as gesture it is tremendously effective, restoring our sense of the poet's presence within his poem and enabling him to recover his characteristic oral idiom.

Section 8 continues the series of rhetorical questions that move Whitman towards the total speech act of section 9:

Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm'd Manhattan?

River and sunset and scallop-edg'd waves of flood-tide? The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat

in the twilight, and the belated lighter? What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and

with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as I approach? (11. 92-95)

The first four lines of the section incorporate key images from previous sections, carrying them from the passive constative mode marked by "I saw," "I look'd," and so on, to the more active medium of the rhetorical question. Paul de Man discusses the rhetorical question at some length in the opening chapter of his Al- legories of Reading, pointing out that there is always a danger of such a question being read literally-as when Edith Bunker asks her husband Archie whether he would like his bowling shoes laced over or under, and in response to her husband's exasperated "What's the difference?" patiently proceeds to explain the difference.12 As de Man recognizes, such a mistake points to a funda- mental ambiguity in the structure of all rhetorical questions, which he identifies as a confusion between literal and figurative mean- ings, but which could, I think, be more accurately described as the coexistence of performative and constative functions. A nonrhetorical or "serious" question is a performative, i.e., an utterance with a specific illocutionary aim, namely the eliciting of a response. But because it implicitly answers itself, a rhetorical question deliberately suspends its performativity, converting the in- terrogative mode into a stylish vehicle for simply making a state-

12Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 9-10.




ment, for conveying a purely constative meaning. This latent doubleness explains why the rhetorical question provides Whit- man with an ideal mediation between the wholly constative sections of the poem and the pure performatives to come. As rhetoric the questions constate, but as grammar they perform, and so they act as a kind of hinge between the two modes, allowing Whitman to pass from one to the other without making too abrupt and jarring a leap.

The concluding lines of the section leave behind the world of perceptual phenomena and once more enter that uncanny tex- tual space in which Whitman meets us face to face:

What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?

Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?

We understand then do we not? What I promis'd without mentioning it, have you not accepted? What the study could not teach-what the preaching could

not accomplish is accomplish'd, is it not? (11. 96-100)

In the poem's opening lines Whitman's anxieties forced him to displace the face-to-face meeting with the other onto a communion with things, with tide, cloud, and sunset. Only after having confronted and subdued the threat of temporality and death can he now bear to make that profoundest of contacts once more. The infinitely subtle process that fuses us to Whitman as we read him, that pours his meaning into us and engenders perfect understand- ing, perfect empathy, can only be living speech, or that intensified representation of speech that Whitman's poetry offers at its best. Rhetorically the passage seems to vibrate with the sheer pathos of voice, which Whitman places in apposition to the similar pathos of eye contact, invoking an almost sexual communion between poet and reader. In this climactic moment of total imaginative identification, the text itself disappears; surely the most unnerving aspect of the passage is that blank space that follows Whitman's unmistakably orgasmic proclamation of his fusion with us. Words fall away, and we feel the poet's unmediated presence filling that white space, as in the passage from "So Long!" where he leaps from the page into our arms. 13

'3This moment of "crossing" between Whitman and the projected reader bears




In the last section of the poem Whitman crosses definitively into spoken utterance, abandoning the death-saturated written id- ioms of the middle sections and reasserting his former position of absolute mastery over the object-world:

Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide! Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg'd waves! Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me,

or the men and women generations after me! Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!

(11. 101-4)

Once again key images of the ferry ride are repeated, but this time they are cast neither as constatives nor as questions, but as imperatives. The imperative is, of course, the performative utterance or speech act par excellence, the will manifesting itself directly in language or, alternately, language projecting a fictive or linguistically constituted will. Moreover, like all true performatives the imperative or command functions most effectively in a speech situation, in which speaker and addressee are simultaneously present. By concluding his poem with a majestic suite of commands, Whitman both proclaims and performs his recovery of voice and presence. The fact that his imperatives are nothing but approving

a striking resemblance to what Harold Bloom terms "the Crossing of Identifica- tion," the last of three transitional moments that he isolates within his paradigm of the crisis poem: "The third and final crossing, which I have called the Crossing of Identification, takes place between metaphor and metalepsis, or psychoanalyt- ically between sublimation and introjection, that is between substituting some labor for one's own prohibited instincts and the psychic act of so identifying oneself with something or someone outside the self that time seems to stand still or to roll back or forward. The dilemma here is the confrontation with mortality, with total death, and the prohibited instinct is the drive toward death, the self-destructiveness that Freud hypothesized 'beyond the pleasure principle'" (Wallace Stevens, p. 403). Within the poem, the labor of sublimation is performed by Whitman's meticulous cataloguing of sights and sounds, which substitutes for an overt acknowledgement of mortality. More clearly, Whitman moves to an identification with his future reader that does indeed cause time to roll both backward and forward, thereby eliding the death that had previously intervened. I would only differentiate Whit- man's poem from Bloom's paradigm in that I do not see a drive toward death so much as a recognition of death as the force against which the poet is defending himself here. In other words death in this poem is associated not with the instincts but with the external world as it is given to cognition.



"CROSSING BROOKLYN FERRY 1 359

commands directing things to continue exactly as they have been and would go on doing anyway should not lessen our sense of Whitman's newly-won power here. In effect he assumes the role of Yahweh in Genesis, constituting the world by the power of his own voice. Fiat replaces perception as the controlling grammar of his relationship to the object-world, willfully subordinating all phenomena to the poet's godlike ego, which regains its solipsistic centrality once more.'4

The two concluding imperatives move from the particular phenomena evoked in the previous lines to the more general categories that embrace them, and in so doing offer a final, star- tlingly clear articulation of the spirit/matter dialectic that has been at work throughout the poem:

Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual, Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting.

(11. 124-25)

The expansive, spiritual being of selfhood is the fluid medium that enables Whitman to fuse himself with others, be they com- panions or readers, and so to escape the limitations of biological and historical existence. But it is only through the durability of objects, of material things like boats and books, that Whitman is able to preserve the fragile spirit, breath, or voice that speaks to us in this poem. Having moved away from writing and toward speech, Whitman now acknowledges their necessary interdepen- dence. Without the text of the poem to preserve it, Whitman's voice would not survive his death; but without the surging current of illocutionary force that runs through the poem's closing section, the text would be an empty signifier pointing only to the poet's absence. In themselves, then, the finitude of spirit and the in- animacy of objects are equally undesirable; only by somehow re- conciling or collapsing these two categories can the poem become an incarnation of the poet.

Just such a reconciliation is presented in the closing lines of the poem:

14I am in complete agreement with Anderson when he finds "an assumption of authority in the poem more complete, more like that of a god, than we can find consistently rendered anywhere else" (The Imperial Self, p. 124).




You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers, We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate

henceforward, Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves

from us, We use you, and do not cast you aside-we plant you

permanently within us, We fathom you not-we love you-there is perfection in you also, You furnish your parts toward eternity, Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

(11. 126-32)

In its apocalyptic evocation of a final healing of the subject/object rift, the poem's closing passage fuses matter and spirit, bestowing on each properties of the other. The verb "use" ("We use you") points to the purposive nature of this process; by planting objects permanently within the self, Whitman in effect commands them to lend the self their own stability and rugged permanence. This intermingling of spirit and matter, self and thing, voice and text, is the necessary premise in any declaration of poetic immortality. In the last two lines of the poem the relationship between these categories is made quite clear; objects (here the referent of "You") "furnish their parts toward eternity" by virtue of their lasting nature, but at the same time "furnish their parts toward the soul" which plants them within itself. A triangular relationship is thus set up, in which by implication the soul also partakes of eternity, becoming as "lasting" and timeless as the objects themselves. The eternizing of the self is of course a primary aim of all lyric poetry; by infusing his spirit or breath into a material object, a written text, the poet hopes to survive his historical death, remaining a presence to future generations long after his biological life has ended. (The most explicit articulation of this aim in poetic tra- dition is surely "Sailing to Byzantium," a poem that clearly bears comparison with "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," though its overtly visionary content pits it against Whitman's celebration of physical reality.) It is through just such a confidence in the ability of his poem to fuse matter and spirit, writing and speech, that Whitman is able to overcome the anxiety caused by the thought of his own death and to assume authority over his experience once more.

At this point I think a crucial distinction needs to be made, one which has a bearing on our judgment of Whitman's whole



"CROSSING BROOKLYN FERRY ' 361

poetic project. It can argued that in asserting his immortality and his continued presence to the reader, Whitman is simply deluding himself. Indeed from a skeptical point of view, nothing that he states discursively in the poem's closing sections is literally true. But Whitman is not a wisdom poet; he does not purport to give us valuable knowledge that cannot be had elsewhere. His is preeminently a poetry of action rather than statement."5 "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is a great poem not because it reveals a truth to which we can imaginatively accede, but because it vigorously performs an act of psychic crossing that leaves both poet and reader strengthened. Finally, Whitman is a poet who tells us nothing. But in this and other poems he shows us how the mind can act to overcome its deepest anxieties, and can empower itself to meet the world with joy.

Cornell University

'5Whitman recorded the following passage from Huxley in his commonplace book: "I myself agree with the sentiment of Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesbury, that 'the scope of all speculation is the performance of some action or thing to be done.' I have not any very great respect for, or interest in, mere 'knowing,' as such" (quoted in Specimen Days [Boston: David R. Godine, 1971], p. 113).



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From Anxiety to Power: Grammar and Crisis in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"