For Whitman, the 10-minute ride on the Fulton Street Ferry symbolizes functionality. Much like a contemporary subway train or a city bus, the ferry ride is a living, never-failing expression of urban life. Before the Brooklyn Bridge opened in the 1880s, the ferry bussed thousands of commuters every day to midtown and back, among them Whitman himself. The ferry has other meanings, however. As an acolyte of Emerson’s Transcendentalism, Whitman doesn’t believe in the limitations of any object. In the poem, the ferry comes to symbolize nothing less than the heroic journey of life itself. That symbolic value opens up the commuter ride to contain and envelop all of those on the ferry’s deck.

The poem is set in December, in the late afternoon (“the sun there half an hour high” [Line 2]). That season and time of day symbolically suggest the movement of each of us from birth to death as the afternoon sun concedes to the encroaching dark. But there is no hushed tragedy, no gloomy sorrow over the journey toward death. The movement is constant: No single journey, no single commuter defines or defies the journey. The poem sustains a sense of animation that fuses the individual and the communal journeys that we take.