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.

Thoughts While Reading "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in English 362: American Romanticism (1-4)

1.

Body-tide surround me! I step in time with you;

Trees in the east! Sun there near and hour high! I step in time with you also.

Herds of young students accoutered in the usual fashions! how strange you seem to me!

In the wood desks, the ten and ten and five that sit, beginning class, are more foreign to me than you might suppose;

And you that cross through this door years away are less to me, and less in my contemplations, than others right now.

2.

The unidentifiable substance of me from somewhere, in all seconds and hours of day;

The modest, cut, well-planned design--myself a piece, but everyone also a part of the design;

The countenance of the past and whisper of the future;

The acheivements hung like string-lights beyond my line of sight but luminous--on the clean

chalkboard, and the paper notebooks open to a fresh page;

The bodies "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" with me, taking me away;

The ones who follow me, these words between me and them;

The certainty of these words--the sight, the sound, the meaning of them.

Others will sit in these chairs, and cross through that door;

Others will write upon that blackboard;

Others will open their notebooks to fresh pages, ready to be filled with someone else's thoughts;

Others will read this poem attentively or no;

Twenty years away, others will teach them as they read, the sun almost an hour high;

Fifty years away, or perhaps even a hundred years away, others will teach them,

Will enjoy the morning, will enjoy the body-tide, the reading of the poem confusing the now-

still body-tide.

3.

It means nothing, this room, this hour--place means nothing;

I am here, you students of a graduating class, and all your class after;

I read myself into your lecture, and return again and again as I read--with you.

Just as you looked when you looked out the window onto grass and brick, so I felt;

Just as you were one of a class, I was one of a clas;

Just as you were waking in the too-early morning, so was I waking,

Just as you filled your notebooks with things you did not think or say, so I filled mine with comments equally unthought;

Just as you read these free-verse words about humanity's shared flow and ebb, I read.

I too, and numerous times came to campus, the sun less than an hour high;

I watched the finch tottering in the trees, say them flapping and hopping, fitting his wings through branches and over still-dewy soil,

I saw their umber colors and their flashes of color shimmer in the morning sun,

I saw them rousing about, gradually opening with us the day.

I saw the reflection of the room in the cool window,

my image faint against the background of the glass, but bright,

looked at the hovering film of sun sheening there and turning a pale scene in the clear mirror,

look'd at the dark bricks and trees beyond to the north and northwest,

look'd on the fog as the rising heat dispelled it to only dew,

look'd toward the box room to notice the arriving students,

Saw them waking up, saw those who sat near me,

Saw their gray slate of the board--saw bodies anchored to chairs,

The students at writing in their notebooks, or listening with varied attentiveness,

The indigo-cupped eyes, the linear motions of pens in hand, the metal coils binding paper,

The shift and shuffle of uncomfortable seats, the students in their desk-houses,

The white dust left by chalk, the quick scribble to catch axioms of knowledge,

The bustle of pages turning, the surrendered open of bindings,

The distant scallop-edg'd hills through the window, the open books, the militant ink and matte,

The stretch of desks in rows of cherry-varnish shimmer, the painted cinderblock lining of exterior walls,

In the room the lighted group, the long scholar-rows flanked on each side by another--the b blackboard, the walnut lectern,

On a neighboring hall, the sun lights dormant chimneys burning high and full into the morning,

Casting its flicker of marigold, contrasted with lively white and mellow blue light, over the tops of trees, and down into the clefts of hills.

4.

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

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

I loved well these halls;

I loved well the stately and abiding columns;

The professors and students I saw were all near to me;

Others the same--others who think back on me, because I thought forward to them;

(The time will come, though I stop here this morning and night.)