"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" consists of nine sections for a total of 132 lines. It is one of Whitman's mid-length poems, "not so sprawling as '
Song of Myself' but with enough space to allow him some musical and thematic amplitude." The poem's timeframe begins a half hour before sunset, and the poet quickly establishes an intimacy with the reader: Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! 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. In section 3, Whitman employs "cataloguing" and
parallelism, which are techniques he often used in longer poems to build a cumulative power: Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow, Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south, Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water, In the middle sections 5 and 6, the poet has a kind of crisis of doubt, expressed in lines such as "I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me", and: 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? Section 9 reintroduces the catalogued list of images from section 3, but with "a difference in tone, which derives in part from the imperative mode of the verb that is used throughout to begin the lines, giving them conviction and assurance that they did not have before." He has experienced a crisis and a transcendence, elevating what could be a mundane ferry-boat ride into a celebration of the cityscape, the water, the people taking the ferry, and humanity in general. ==Composition and publication history==