Human Culture And The Physical World In Walt Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Whitman demonstrates the significance of the connection between “human culture” and “the physical world” in his poetry, particularly in the poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” which shows the experiences of a man’s journey home from Manhattan by the Brooklyn ferry. His Romanticist tendencies are highlighted through his description of the setting sun and the “flood-tide” as being pure and awe-inspiring, alluding to the celebration of nature that was present in Emerson’s ‘Nature’ in 1836, the leader of the Transcendentalist movement. The poem also referred to the significance of nature in Romantic literature, an 18th-century intellectual movement with a predominant focus on the individual, the irrational and the subjective. (Could anything be added

The second section of the stanza shows the mere observations the narrator made of his fellow passengers from a distance in his “meditations” in an attempt to better understand them and their “curious” behaviours, almost suggesting the narrator to be the figurative vessel between mankind and “the physical world”. A rocking motion is created by the phrase “similitudes of the past and those of the future” which not only mimics the movement of the boat, and the ebb and flow of the tide, but also represents a distance between the reader and the narrator as a result of the generation gap. This also mirrors the “ebb-tide” and the “flow-tide” of the poem, as the poem itself moves closer and becomes more personal through the intimate address of nature in Section 1, then moves further away through the distant observations made of humans from the periphery during “meditation”. The significance of the relationship between humans and nature is also explored in ‘In Cabin’d Ships at Sea’, in which the sea represents the immensity of the world whilst the “cabin’d ships” are symbolic of the individuals who inhabit