Thoughts While Reading "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in English 362: American Romanticism (5-8)

5

What is it, then, between us?

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not.

6

I too lived—Lexington, of ample hills, was mine;

I too walk’d the paths of this university, and strolled in the woods around it;

I too felt the uncertain sharp questionings stir within me,

In the day, among throngs of students, sometimes they overcame me,

In my walks to classes, or as I study in my carrel, they overcame me.

I too had been struck from the day forever held in motion;

I too had receiv’d a self by my Body;

That I was, I felt in my body—and what I would be I knew I would be of my body.

7

It is not upon you alone the frantic deadline falls,

The deadlines have fallen—too soon—upon me also;

The best I had done seem’d to me unfinished and doubtful;

My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality mediocre? Would not professors dock me?

You alone do not know what it is to be afraid;

I am she who knew what it is to be afraid;

I too danced in time to uncertainty,

Stress’d, blanch’d, worried, cheated, envied, frustrat’d,

Had spite, anger, menacing, vain wishes I dared not think,

Was disgusted, selfish, desolate, suspicious, shy, dissatisfied, powerless,

The hyena, the doe, the sloth, not lacking in me,

The brooding expression, the sharp word, the sinful wish, not lacking,

Objections, disappointments, failings, eagerness, sympathy, none of these lacking.

8

But I was studently, naïve and proud!

I was question’d on a poem I didn’t understand by the menacing voice of an aging academic as he saw me cowering as I was sitting,

Felt the eyes of others’ on my neck as I answered, or the indifference of their attention on me as I sputtered,

Saw many I knew in their seats, or outside, or in the hall, yet to whom I’d never spoken,

Lived the same life with the rest, the same old studying, sleeping, eating,

Act’d the part that still looks back on that learner,

The same common role, the role we make our own, as consequential as we like,

Or as trivial as we like, or both consequential and trivial.