Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Symbolism, Imagery & Wordplay

The tide is the first thing that the speaker addresses "face to face" in the poem. The ebb and flow of the tides – and their currents – represent continuity. Whitman thinks that human g...

An eternal tension between light and darkness: just another way "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is like Star Wars. The poem's imagery actually seems go grow darker as it progresses, as if to mirror the s...

OK, so Whitman's poem is hardly the first example of this age-old comparison, perhaps most famously used in Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" speech. But the speaker of the poem adds a unique...

Apostrophe is when a writer addresses someone or something that cannot respond. If we listed all the examples of apostrophe in this poem, we'd have to put down most of its lines. He starts out talk...

What did you expect? The poem is about a ferry ride over the East River from Manhattan to Brooklyn – of course Whitman is going to give us the sights and sounds of the city. He paints what am...

We're not sure whether to call this imagery "spiritual" and "religious" – Whitman is caught in the netherworld between the two. He clearly does not have much taste for traditional, organized...