EIGHTEEN

WHAT IS IT THEN BETWEEN US?

Whitman’s signature gesture, and his great accomplishment—setting aside, for the moment, the invention of American free verse, the elevation of colloquial speech into an astonishingly flexible, workable mode of poetic discourse, and the first open inscriptions of same-sex love since the Renaissance—lies in the way he reaches through the curtain formed by words, paper, and ink, stepping into the readerly present with a directness and immediacy that have never lost their power to startle. These lines from “To You,” a meditation on what the essence of a self might be, are a prime example:

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,

I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands,

Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,

Your true soul and body appear before me,

They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work, farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,

I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

I read this passage to Alex, who first admired it, then laughed at what he saw as a manipulative gesture, a means of seduction. Hucksterism, self-promotion, putting one’s product out there for all to see—these essential American activities came booming into their own in Whitman’s day, as the latter half of the nineteenth century invented marketing and publicity. How could a newspaperman fail to understand the power of an artfully shaded turn of phrase, how a memorable or rhythmic slogan made an object desirable, an idea attractive, a political position agreeable? Only recently a graduate student at the University of Houston turned up a forgotten Whitman text, a grooming and exercise manual intended to be serialized in a number of papers—a guide for men to self-presentation, advice for men who wanted to shape how they were seen. Such endeavors might have seemed vain, after the war, when Whitman had spent his days walking from bed to bed in makeshift hospitals, bringing oranges, candy, and postage stamps to mutilated young men. He listened to their stories, read letters from home aloud to those who, blinded or illiterate, could not read them themselves, took dictation for their letters home, and sat by them when they died. But even then the poet was sending press releases to the Boston Globe, noting the charitable work “the poet Walt Whitman” had undertaken. Self-promotion? Of course. Had he not had a knack for it, we would have no first two editions of his book, perhaps no book at all. He wanted to stand in the light of visibility and admiration, as the reviews of his own work he published anonymously demonstrate.

But to my mind there is such profound conviction in the second stanza of “To You” that the moment in which those lines were written and the moment in which they are read collapse, as Whitman must have intended them to do. Reading is a privacy occupying singular moments in time, but the reader who made pencil notes in my facsimile of the first edition fifty years ago and I seem to have had the same experience at particular passages. When readers share this sense of contact with the poet himself, his warping of time is further compounded. The poem bends the time-space in which it resides; it goes on gathering together instants of fusion between then and now, between then and the way we experience the then now, and between him and me, him and you, you and me, a whole company of us who cannot see one another now, though I am tempted to say, as the Christian pastors I grew up hearing might have said, we will sometime.

WHITMAN WANTED—with a passion seemingly as strong as any in his life—to be read, in his time and ours. In all his huge body of work I can find mention of only two things he wishes to possess: the love of a comrade and the attention of the reader. This latter desire is not bound in time; I considered long and seriously of you, he writes in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” before you were ever born. What good is the song of myself without you to hear it, or to join in?

The love of a comrade and the attention of the reader: these desires (which have no clear boundary between them) reach effortlessly across years and cities, then centuries and continents. No poet has spoken to the audiences of the future with such certainty that they are there, listening. Nowhere does this address ring as clearly and hauntingly as it does in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” a poem that wins hands-down any competition for the most uncanny of American poems. In 1856, when the poem was written, Whitman had the barest handful of readers; what poet—even one with a large audience in his or her own time—has the nerve to summon to attention those not yet born? Shakespeare, in the sonnets, and probably no one else.

I want to say that Whitman has succeeded in this project more than he might have dreamed, but the poem provides every evidence of a writer who, as Edward Carpenter said of him, “knows exactly what he is doing.” For us, the poet’s attention seems to beam from a point in the past and to shine from a continuous present that exists in our immersion in the poem. The poem makes a now, as the speaker addresses us directly, as he has been speaking to readers, in increasing numbers, for 160 years. He becomes, as he said of himself, a uniter of here and hereafter. Is that a way of saying that he makes himself a ghost, no longer human exactly, but a presence who dwells in time in a way we don’t know how to chart?

THE LOVE OF A COMRADE. The time when the greatest erotic charge lay, for me, in the slipstream of men of New York or Houston or Los Angeles, whatever large city I found myself in, the flashing masculine currents and shoals Walt Whitman also enjoyed (firm masculine colter it shall be you) seems to have passed, for me. Not that my head can’t be turned, or that a random flirtation doesn’t arouse interest or even action on my part, but I recognize now where a sense of satisfaction lies for me, a feeling of coming to rest. Though that arriving at anchor, against the beautiful long form of my lover’s body, is no passive harboring, but something more like Dickinson’s “rowing in Eden.”

We met online. I enjoyed the lightness and freshness of Ethan’s company, and his dedication to giving pleasure. He’d appear from time to time, and we’d take mutual delight in an evening. We had knowledge of one another in the present tense, which turns out to be a lovely way to get to know someone. Over the course of ten years—during which I was first newly divorcing myself from Paul, and much later leaving Alex—we underwent together a kind of alchemical process I can’t claim to explain. In a while we acknowledged that having sex became making love. The difference in our ages—he is twenty-three years younger than I am, and achingly beautiful—and circumstances, our domestic situations, all that seemed to burn away, till we were left with two naked bodies and two equally unclothed subjectivities, rapt with each other all the time we were together. Of course one of us would be preoccupied now and then, less than fully present, but the extraordinary thing is that for those years our congress became both warmer and hotter, increasingly an occasion that seem lifted up above all the rest, a time out of time.

SOME THINGS ARE SO INHERENTLY METAPHORIC that a poet need only point to their existence in order for the meanings they embody to emerge; surely Brooklyn Ferry and the bridge that would take its place late in Whitman’s life belong to that category of being. The ferry between islands (running more or less from near the old Fulton Street Fish Market, near South Street Seaport, to Fulton’s Landing in Brooklyn, just south of the bridge) linked two boroughs, making a unity of disparate parts. Such boats had, in the underworld, ferried the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans into the land of the dead, linking the lit and shadow realms, though the journey was generally offered in only one direction. Brooklyn Ferry shuttled citizens back and forth on a regular schedule; its constant motion seemed an inevitable emblem of ongoingness, as riders poured on and off, or stood their moment by the railing as pennants flapped and the masts of a hundred ships gleamed along the docks. The casts changed, but the scene remained essentially the same, and thus every passenger stood in relation to every other, all of us connected by our voyaging.

The bridge that John Augustus Roebling and his son Washington Augustus Roebling would build, allowing walkers and vehicles to arc in the air above nearly the same course, was likewise emblematic. The gothic arches of its two great pylons, as well as its cables strung like harp strings, inevitably suggested religious associations. Its skyward curve seemed a physical embodiment of our aspirations. As Whitman took possession of Brooklyn Ferry as an emblem of human continuity in time, so sixty years later Hart Crane crowned “the most beautiful bridge in the world” with a superb crown of appositives, a litany of poetic names:

O harp and altar, of the fury fused . . .

. . . thy swift

unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars . . .

O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits

The agile precincts of the lark’s return . . .

Crane’s rhetorical heights work to lift our vision, intent on illuminating the spiritual dimensions of the bridge. If that splendid final example above strains against sense, it does so to show us Brooklyn Bridge as itself a great metaphysical poem. How to read commits? Does the poet mean that the leap commits in the way one commits a crime, or that the leap commits in the way one pledges loyalty to something? Or should we turn to the Latin committere: to connect? Can one do any of those things to the agile precincts of the lark’s return? The phrase is so gorgeous that I don’t care about the answer to my question.

Crane works near the limits of language, while his predecessor employs plainer speech to evoke his vision, rendering both the sensory experience of the ferry (the glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings) and the spiritual dimension the poet apprehends through that experience. Whitman’s poem introduces the idea of historical continuity gradually, persuading or seducing us through an attentive naming of things interspersed with rhetorical passages that make the spiritual and temporal realms they propose seem as real as the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east.

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” was first called “Sundown Poem,” proof positive that the slogan promulgated by Beat poets, “First thought, best thought,” is not reliably the case. The poem’s elegant sections advance its argument while simultaneously building a superbly realized model of the physical experience of riding a ferryboat across one of the world’s busiest rivers, navigating a crowded and richly drawn universe of things on, above, and around New York Harbor.

As with a number of Whitman’s poems, this one was published first without any division into sections. The sections were an excellent choice; they allow the intensity of the poem’s argument to build, and they lend resonance to those lines that end sections as well as to those that begin them. The first of the poem’s sections begins:

Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face;

Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.

Much is established here: a pattern of direct address to various elements of the scene (Clouds of the west!), as though it were important simply to call the parts of the world by their names. To be face to face with flood-tide, cloud, and sun suggests that those aspects of the world have faces; they are our fellow travelers, accompanying us on our journey in time, our movement across the waters; the poet acknowledges their presence as players on the great stage of the day.

The speaker turns then to his fellow passengers, who are, he says, more curious to me than you suppose. This is a rather mild assertion. The poet doesn’t say in what way he might be curious; the wording suggests an interest less than passionate. Whitman’s understatement allows him to go a little farther, asserting an interest in those who’ll ride the ferry far in the future.

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

There are many reasons one might be curious about the citizens of the future. The poet isn’t ready to disclose his; he knows he must begin quietly, building a context in order for his argument to strike us as plausible. As a true free-verse poet startlingly ahead of his moment, he uses the act of composition as a way to discover what he thinks, to develop his own understanding of what may be, at this point in the composing of the poem, only dimly apprehended. The question he proposes—what are you to me, passengers of the future?—reverberates in the silence between sections. I like knowing that Brooklyn Ferry runs again now, on a slightly changed route, so that Whitman’s question may indeed travel directly toward those he intended to hear it.

Though whether or not we ride that ferryboat across the East River, we are passengers of the future, are we not?

EACH OF THE TWO STANZAS in the second section of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is a single sentence, and each has its own focus. The first sketches out a position concerning the self—understood not as an isolate entity but something more like a dialogue between awareness and world. It’s a list of phrases, but it manages to form a remarkably clear and compact exposition of Whitman’s radical understanding of subjectivity: “I” is an ongoing, dynamic relation, a subjectivity joined to and sustained by everything “outside” it. The speaker is dazzled and nourished by the physical world as it appears in this moment: The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings.

But his experience is not bound solely in space; the stanza mentions all hours of the day; the similitudes of the past, and those of the future; the others that are to follow me. The self is extended in time as well as in space, a confluence of what’s been and what’s to come; we are shifting, unbounded, admitting and responding to everything “outside” us.

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

The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme—myself disintegrated, 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 away,

The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them.

The certainty of others—the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

How elegant the compact line, The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away; the poet effortlessly places us here and far away at once, a bit of evidence for a claim he’s soon make, that distance avails not. The certainty of others in all this fluidity is perhaps the only firm anchor here; we can be sure of being bound to a chain of human others unfolding ahead of us. That thought becomes the driving principle of the second stanza.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore,

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,

Others will see the islands large and small,

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.

There is no mention here of the past; the poet’s concern is for the contact he can make with the future, how he might extend himself ever so many hundred years hence. No end-times thinking here, no looming apocalypse. There’s something deeply comforting in Whitman’s confidence in the presence of those who will come after him; he’s heartened by the fact of their persistence, just as he takes comfort in the pouring in and falling back of the tides that end this stanza.

MAYBE THERE IS A MOMENTUM generated in the making of great poems that propels them beyond the reach of ordinary time; perhaps some have the power to step out of the flowing-forward. This would explain how the poems of Emily Dickinson, carefully copied into the forty handstitched booklets she kept inside her desk, called out to be found, to begin their long blossoming into the world, and how you might, in the still hours of the night, from a fussy Victorian guesthouse in Amherst, sense still from across the street the roiling activity of a restless presence, a relentless intellect dwelling in the ceaselessly self-consuming energy of its omnidirectional doubt. Or feel the distilled sorrow of John Keats pour into you in half a house near Hampstead Heath. Or see the face of Walt Whitman appear above the shoulders of a bedmate on a winter afternoon early in the twenty-first century, in an apartment tower in Hell’s Kitchen. These presences are not Dickinson, Keats, or Whitman themselves, but something more miraculous than any ghost: an intervention in reality committed by the power of art.

Have their poems fixed something of the soul in time, as William Everson said the book could? Their lights, broken through the prismatic gaze of readers, come beaming into the present. I understand that this is a wildly romantic notion to set on the table at this point in history, I make no claim to understand how such a thing is possible, I am certain only that the power released in those acts of making, in which the poet brought an unrelenting concentration to the embodiment of presence, a gift to the future—that heat seems to remain in the world for a very long time.

SECTION 3 OF “CROSSING BROOKLYN FERRY” begins with a deep, headlong dive into the heart of the poem, perhaps precipitated by the tides that poured in and ebbed at the end of the previous lines. The poet is ready to state his case directly:

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,

I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd . . .

Avail means to have value, worth, or efficacy; the inverted syntax here suggests that Whitman drew the word from the Bible. Space and time do not have the power to separate us, or at least to separate the poet who speaks to us from the living crowd we are. I don’t know why that last line above feels so achingly poignant. Perhaps the answer lies in the strange and subtle thing the poet’s just done, a shift in tense one barely notices. I am with you, he writes, but by the end of the following line, and still within that single sentence, his presence is located in the past: Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt. Whitman was thirty-seven when he wrote that line, but he speaks to us as one already dead, and thus the line that follows, Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd, comes with a particular emotional tone, a melancholy relish. For the first time the poet positions himself as a citizen of the past, one who speaks to us from the dead, recalling the physical proximity he loved, the jostle and thronging life around him. In the space of a line he has joined the great company of the dead, taken up residence outside of time—although he hasn’t left us, not by a long shot.

As if to demonstrate that he is fully there, present on that now-vanished ferry, just as he might be fully “here” in any moment in an ongoing present, Whitman fills the rest of Section 3 with a splendidly alert catalog of what the crossing offers the senses, observed so exactly we feel as he intended:

I watched the December sea-gulls, I saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings oscillating their bodies,

I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow . . .

The precision of observation, the detail of those shadows, seems to inscribe this section with a signature: I, Walt Whitman, saw this. The man loved these crossings, as he wrote in his compilation of prose notes, sketches, and meditations, Specimen Days: I have always had a passion for ferries; to me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems.

His cascade of physical detail does not shy away from the spiritual. It portrays a material world not transcended by spirit, but imbued by it:

Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,

Looked at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water . . .

That halo is not of another world but of this one. It’s echoed in a poem I’ve mentioned earlier, “To You”:

Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-figure of all,

From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-colored light,

But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-colored light . . .

The poet-muralist here sees on every head a golden aura of divinity; Whitman here seems to echo the English poet perhaps most akin to him, the visionary William Blake: Everything that lives is holy. We know that Whitman read him, at some point in his life, but not when. A Mrs. Gilchrist, an English champion of Blake’s poems, took a great shine to Whitman’s work. A widow, she voyaged to America with the intention of marrying him, a project she abandoned, settling for friendship and eventually heading home.

THE TWO SECTIONS that follow are stately, superbly written pieces of oratory, reiterating the poem’s assertion of the connection between the speaker and men and women to come. Each time it recurs, this claim seems to gain in import and implication, and to swell toward greater confidence. The Whitman who does not believe that time or space can limit the reach of his voice gains his stride now, and sounds his boldest notes:

These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,

I project myself a moment to tell you—also I return.

I loved well these cities,

I 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 looked forward to them,

(The time will come, though I stop here today and tonight.)

This is the first time that the speaker looks into the future and discovers there a reciprocity. Who are those who look back because I looked forward to them? Citizens of the city of robust friends? Poets who bend back their gaze to meet the extraordinary presence who has established a new relation to time in these pages? Have I looked back to Whitman because he has all my life, though I did not know it, looked forward to me?

Those lines are the entirety of the poem’s shortest section, and I imagine it’s the most concise in order to let its final line ring into the silence that follows. The statement is parenthetical, an aside, almost a whisper. It reframes the ending of “Song of Myself” (I stop somewhere waiting for you) by simply stating that the meeting between Whitman and his reader will happen; he doesn’t just wait for us but knows we are coming. He may have stopped just for a day or night’s rest; he may have “stopped” because, on the day of composing this poem, he has become part of the past—has, in essence, died, though he will live for another thirty-six years, and though his voice, speaking now from the past he transforms into a continuous present, remains audible, available, proof of his presence.

THE POEM’S NEXT SECTION begins with a question: how many years have elapsed between the writing of his poem and your reading of it—scores, hundreds? Whatever it is, he reiterates, slightly varying his statement from Section 2, distance avails not, and place avails not. The repeated phrase is a sort of spell, intended to intervene in the movement and character of time by establishing a new position from which to speak.

The bonds—affections, cities, questions—the poet knows he shares with his readers, though they may be hundreds of years apart, overrule any sense of separation. Two remarkable statements complete this argument, two radical propositions placed just at the section’s close.

The first is a claim as mysterious as anything in Whitman’s poetry: I too, he writes, had been struck from the float forever held in solution. What can he mean? It sounds like a sort of manufacturing method, some industrial vocabulary he might have gleaned from the Crystal Palace exhibition—but I can find no evidence to support this idea. Struck as sparks might be struck? Each more or less identical, as the poet suggests in another poem:

Men and women passing in the streets,

If they are not flashes and specks, what are they?

Or struck as we say coins or medals are struck from a mold? Is the float something solid, like a bar of silver used in an electroplating process, from which molecules of silver might be transferred to another, waiting surface? Or should we think of the float as something liquid or in suspension, in the sense that Whitman uses the word in “Song of the Open Road”:

Something there is in the float of the sight of things that

provokes it out of the soul.

It in this line is wisdom, and the float in question is the procession of objects before our eyes. Is the float forever held in solution then a perpetual flux, an endless source from which we are each, in some way, catalyzed—so that, whatever our differences shaped by history and culture, language and social position, we are, at the flashpoint of our beginning, joined?

If we are all struck from the float forever held in solution, whatever it may be, sparked or minted or catalyzed from that same source, then how to account for individuality? The lines that follow answer, forming a second proposition:

I too had received identity by my body,

That I was, I knew was of my body, and what I should be,

I knew I should be of my body.

Out of the range of categories a person might occupy, how many are determined by the flesh itself? Male or female, trans or intersex, gay or straight, and what of the range of human skin tones, or the other characteristics we consider aspects of “race” with all the social, culturally determined consequences they bring with them? Tall or short, ecto-or endomorph, hairy, smooth, symmetrical or misaligned: they seem nearly endless, the myriad ways the self is shaped by the particular givens of the body, though we aren’t always certain what’s a given and what is not. It’s only through the body, Whitman asserts, through sense perception, that we know we exist.

To what degree did the scale of Whitman’s own body shape his sense of the primacy of the physical? A tall man for his time, he stood over six feet in his thirties, large-framed, barrel-chested, an imposing presence. I imagine him reclining, leaning back, filling that small bedroom in Brooklyn his visitors recorded, almost too much for the room that contained him. Did Bronson Alcott note the presence of the chamber pot under the bed because he felt, in that little space, that Whitman’s body was too much with him? His boys must have loved being held by him, pressed against the wide shore of that broad chest! If “Walt Whitman” was a construct, a self created by Walter Jr. who could move in the world with a new social ease, greeting other citizens as equal, seeing himself reflected in the energies of all around him, was that creation an extension of the body he was given?

All this puts me in mind of the Tibetan Buddhists’ idea that what continues in us—the bit that endures, going forward from life to life—is simply awareness; that’s our core, the wide-awake part of us that registers where we are, taking in the world. The rest—biography, character shaped by family, circumstance, culture? Perhaps that’s just identity received by the body, and when the body’s gone all that is, too—leaving you simply a sentience, a gaze looking out at the world.

THREE YEARS AGO NOW, I went to Paris for two weeks, to teach and to breathe in the beautiful winter of that city, all lustrous grays and smoky charcoal. In the summer it can be hard to see Paris behind the throngs in the avenues, the tour buses, the restless crowds in the big square in front of Nôtre-Dame. I loved the astonishing fireworks in July on Bastille Day, seemingly shooting from every crevice of the Eiffel Tower, filling the sky with glowing smokes and streaking trails, but in winter Paris is intimate, the great mask the city lifts to protect itself from the tourist hordes set down. The warm light of shop windows and café doors draws the traveler in, and Paris can be understood in an entirely different fashion.

I was there with Alex, for part of the stay, but I was lonely, too. He stayed on in Europe, to visit family in Germany, while I returned, happy to do so, to fetch our two dogs from the perfect-but-pricey sitter they both adored. Almost as soon as Ethan and I saw each other, at my apartment in the city and then heading out to my little house almost at the very tip of Long Island, we understood that what was between us had changed. How had it happened? We were so deeply, entirely happy to see each other; we seemed bathed in a common light, of which we were the source, a glow that warmed us both. There was no line between this intimacy and desire; I’ve seen in the past how coming closer to a man can make lust begin to fade, as though it were otherness that had fueled it all along. Nothing like that happened; our lovemaking became deeper, more immersive. I had forgotten, or come to doubt, that sex with someone you love is an entirely different thing from the other sort—which is not undesirable in itself, certainly not without pleasure. It’s a matter of magnitude, of what leads one to step into one’s largest self, and to enter into experiences that inscribe themselves so deeply into us as to become benchmarks in a life, unforgettable.

There isn’t a single thing, I believe, that is meant by “being in love.” That phrase is poor shorthand for a range of feelings and relations that are crucial to us, and that I’ve only begun to differentiate in retrospect. I wouldn’t deny or demean any of my adult loves, though I understand that I haven’t always made wise choices in relation to them. What I would say is that I have never loved anyone in quite the way I do Ethan. We spent a long time coming to know one another physically, in the present tense, and from our bodies all else has proceeded.

When I say I have never loved anyone in the way I love him, is that a tautology? Since only he could produce the particular set of responses in me that he does? What is more subterranean, less available for examination than the way we love? What I know for certain is that this complex of feelings, this knowledge gained through the body, through experience and trust, is woven together in me, around me, into something that feels like a dwelling place.

THE NEXT SECTION of Whitman’s poem goes farther in claiming the poet’s connection to us, his likeness to anyone who reads him. It is not upon you alone the dark patches fell, he writes, in a slyly constructed phrase, since it’s nearly inevitable that the sort of weaknesses of character or psychological failings to which Whitman admits in this section are the sort none of us wants to own, and because we’re loathe to air them we’re far more likely to think them either ours alone or far less widely shared than they are. The dark threw patches down upon me also, he continues, and speaks openly of his uncertain relation to his claims to knowledge:

The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious;

My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? would not people laugh at me?

This sort of doubt, if expressed a year earlier in “Song of Myself,” would have deflated that symphonic poem like a balloon slipping out of one’s fingers before the opening’s been tied. These lines demonstrate how profoundly Whitman’s speaker has changed. He burned with certainty, in the radiant vision of “Song of Myself,” flush with the apprehension that there is no separation between self and other. This was no mere idea, but an experienced insight that must have shaken Whitman to the root, and thrown all of life open to reconsideration. One does not, in the grip of such ravishment, doubt.

But no one, save perhaps those who become divinities, can live there. The enlightened soul, come down from the mountaintop or out from the cave, still has to move through the streets where so much depends on you and me, yours and mine, bought and sold, held and desired. All the failings in the energetic, animal catalog of sins the poet claims as his own are only possible when one believes one is an individual, that there is actually such a thing as an other, who may have what you do not, and thus inspire your envy, your calumny, your rage, resentment or lies, guile or lust. The list tumbles out of the poet’s mouth and pen with the ferocity of something held back, offered to us here not just to put us on equal footing but because it has been impelled by necessity. I hear this most clearly in the magnificent line of mostly monosyllabic words, jabbing like repeated thrusts: Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d . . . And then, a line later:

Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant;

The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me . . .

These are extraordinary things to say about oneself, as the poet descends from his sunlit position of knowledge to the realm of the dark patches, the wallow and struggle of those creatures who stand, here, for unbridled and self-serving appetite.

With this section—one that goes to such lengths to show us the speaker’s humanity and cravings, what he has in common with us—comes a startling recognition: the Walt Whitman who speak to us in this poem is, in many ways, a better one. There is something untouchable in the freely circulating, splendidly free speaker we know from “Song of Myself”: he’s gone beyond attachment and craving, since everything around him is his, or him. He desires nothing, really, except to be heard.

But in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” a speaker who is surely brother to that one lives in a paradoxical position. He is no longer dissolved in unity, no longer entirely boundless, though he can see beyond the ordinary limitation of space and time. He knows that his listeners await him, centuries in the future, and that he will not cease speaking as long as there are readers, as long as words inked on a page are understood to represent a heightened version of human speech, and someone believes that insight might be held in suspension in the music of finely tuned language, and that such a suspension might form a stay against time.

Or not a stay: not just a means of fixing a voice, as a recording does, but a means of preserving something of the presence from which that voice speaks, a presence that was human and has now gone on beyond that (though affable, confiding, hopeful), continuously available to us through the agency of a mere poem, holding out—apparently without end—a now and a now and a now—for those readers who will come, and stand in our places in the future.

IT NEVER OCCURRED TO ME to question, exactly, the circumstances William Blake had in mind when he wrote his famous visionary lines

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

I first read them in the 1960s, as a very young man, and I’m sure I saw them cited in texts concerned with the expansion of consciousness, a description or distillation of the sort of thing that might happen when a psychedelic substance opened the doors of perception. Blake, as far I know, had no need of chemical assistance; his dead brother’s ghost and his own propensity to vision brought him to extraordinary vantages. He loved and honored sex. Who could forget the wonderful story of a neighbor coming to call and finding Mr. and Mrs. Blake, nude but for helmets, reading Milton aloud in the back garden?

Thus it seems not illegitimate to read these four lines as a description of heightened sexual congress, when perceptions of space and time seem to dilate, and it becomes difficult to tell earth from heaven.

I want to place one moment here, one of the glories strung like beads, a moment above the city, in suspension, one that might stand for Ethan and me, for what we made together, how we continue, and how we might be seen, by readers of a generation, or if I am lucky of ever so many generations hence. An hour, or hours, outside of time, and therefore contiguous with the past, the present, and the future, not because of what I write here but because that night was, always, unbounded.

We often met, because of our complex domestic arrangements, in hotels. On the night I’m thinking of it was an inexpensive, serviceable hotel just south of Midtown. Because the city had been swept, early that evening, by a blizzard, there were few other guests, and the clerk at the desk gave us a room on a high floor, twenty stories up, looking south. I was there first, getting things ready, and when Ethan arrived—that cold fresh aura of new snow all around his hair and collar—I had turned out the lamp, so that the only light in the room came from the generous snowfall that had silenced our city, downtown laid out before us in fine detail, though everywhere softened and rounded by mounds and drifts. We embraced, we looked out into the night with our arms around each other, and it was hours before either of our hands left the skin of the other. We were alone up there, entirely with one another, and our city, both intimate and immense, cold and breathtakingly lovely, lay at our feet, and the snow ensured that for all that night and well into the morning, neither of us would leave the room.

Blake says that God “does a Human Form Display/to those who Dwell in Realms of Day.” I am grateful that Ethan is a fallible, thoroughly human, irreplaceable man, but I do believe that something of what is most true and most radiantly alive in the world is made visible to me through him, in his beauty and kindness, and in the ferocious sexual heat of him. And not just in “Realms of Day,” but also in the chartless, snowy precincts of night.

WHITMAN BUILT HIS POEM so that each section makes possible the one that follows it. The hot wishes of the “dark patches” section give way to a riff on the pleasures of proximity:

I was called by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,

Felt their arms around my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,

Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat, or public assembly, yet never told them a word,

Lived the same life with the rest . . .

The speaker was a body among bodies, and loved the touch of them, and though he dwells in intimate relation, called by his nighest name, he never speaks his deepest feeling. Because his desire would not fit with their unself-conscious physicality? Because he is both one of them and apart, conscious that he plays a part in a pageant, that he is both participant in this moment in time and at once looking back on it from the vantage point of the future?

From that viewpoint the next section begins with a startlingly direct address to the reader, one that feels increasingly uncanny as it proceeds:

Closer yet I approach you;

What thought you have of me, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,

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

It’s strange to think the poet draws nearer to us, through the agency of his poem, and stranger still to think that our relation is reciprocal, that our awareness of him exists in proportion to the concern he has previously extended to us—a proposition that seems a conundrum until one thinks that for Whitman the moments of the poem’s generation and of its reception have fused. Now—as signaled by Whitman’s shift to the present tense here—there is one continuous moment in which he reaches toward us as we turn to him. This fusion has made possible the wildly disruptive sentence the poet places next:

Who was to know what should come home to me?

Who knows but I am enjoying this?

It’s the last thing I’d have imagined. The poem has worked to establish for its speaker a position in time unlike any we’ve known—or, if the greatest poems speak to us both from the hour of their composition and from an ongoing relationship with the reader, no one has ever quite articulated this. The poet has struggled here to name our commonalities, to position all of us along a grand historical line of those who cross and will cross the river, and out of his triumphant merger with the future, he—well, he enjoys himself. He delights in his position, loves finding us and being found by us. It is a pleasure, he discovers, to be some version of immortal, and this leads him to praise the world that is his, my river and sun-set, and my scallop-edged waves of flood-tide. He praises those who clasp him by the hand, and call him by his nighest name, in happy intimacy, and wonders at that which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you.

At this moment, which to my knowledge has no equivalent in any other poem, save perhaps for the Bhagavad Gita, or the speech of the voice from the whirlwind in Job, the poet has created a vision of the world for us, a richly detailed painted scene, ferryboat, masts, clouds and passengers and haloed reflections in the current—and then simply pushed all that aside, seeming to step out from behind the curtain. He began with the plainest of statements asserting his presence, here and now: Who knows but I am enjoying this? And then:

What is more subtle than this . . .

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

That is, something has been transmitted outside of, or beneath, or above, language. Poems are composed of nothing but language, so this isn’t possible. But We understand then do we not? I believe him wholeheartedly when he writes, What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplished, is it not?

THE REST OF THE POEM is a glorious shout of encouragement to every element of the scene Whitman has drawn; the poet energetically participates in each bit of the action of his poem, praising the things of the world as “beautiful dumb ministers” who bring to us elements of our own souls, or the soul. The you and I that have dominated the stage resolve into a we fully enamored of earth, and the poem ends with a hymn to appearances, a cascade of praise for the world apprehended by the senses:

Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are,

You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul,

About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas,

Thrive, cities—bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers,

Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual,

Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting.

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.

But in fact, no matter how apt this ending is in its enthusiasm, even its joyous humility (we love you), it is, in an odd way, after the fact. It’s a beautiful, necessary downshift, a closure that eases us out of the poem, many lines after “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” has performed its central work: a genuine, barely imaginable intervention in the nature of the real.

The great drama of the poem, by the time we come to those final passages, is over. It ended with the triumph of the questions that conclude the penultimate section, questions that assume their own answers:

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 accomplished, is it not?

These are paradoxical, impossible assertions: the buds folded beneath speech have flowered, and borne fruit: that which cannot be said has been not only said, but understood.

I knew, somewhere behind every word I have written about Walt Whitman, that I would arrive at this moment, which is the poet’s greatest glory, and the exegete’s inescapable defeat. The poem sails on into heaven, where no gloss or paraphrase or explanation can go.

The reader in me believes in words, the poet in what lies beyond them. I wrote every page of this book, in a sense, to lead to this one, where Whitman steps forward from the scene he has built onto the barest stage, and looks at us face to face, and where I step back from the stage I have built, and cease my fountain of appreciation and interpretation, and allow him to still my hand and my lips, and mark here my silence as his words accomplish what words cannot.