In the Library
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Walt Whitman, 1856
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 10 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 2k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Song of Myself
Walt Whitman
Song of Myself does the same thing on an enormous scale, the same voice insisting it contains everyone, but with a whole country in view rather than one river.
£1.99
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Mrs Dalloway does the same thing with a city crowd, but it moves through a single London day inside many heads at once instead of speaking across centuries.
£1.99
The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land watches the same kind of crowd flow over a bridge, but it finds the modern city hollow where Whitman found it holy.
£1.99
About the book
Flood-tide below me, the poem begins, and there is Walt Whitman at the rail of the Brooklyn ferry at sundown, gulls hovering motionless overhead, the foundry chimneys on the far shore throwing black flame and wild red across the rooftops, the fine spokes of light wheeling around the shadow of his own head in the water. Then he looks up and speaks straight to you. Not to readers in general: to you, standing on some deck a century and a half later, the same tide running beneath, the same birds. Time avails not, he insists, distance avails not, and the whole poem is the act of will that makes it so, the crowd on the boat and the crowd not yet born folded into one crowd. He conceals nothing in the bargain, owning the wolf and the hog in himself before he asks for your company. Few poems have loved a stranger this much, or been so certain of reaching them.