Specimen Days: My Passion For Ferries

Whitman equates commuting with poetry in this entry. He thinks of his daily commute as a living poem, one teeming with a plurality of captivating sights for him: schooners, crashing waves and “oceanic currents,” the “tides of humanity” along with those of the water.  Moreover, this stuff is actually the subject of much of his poetry, and we are able to trace his subsequent poetic renderings of this ordinary event to its incipient moments. This entry illustrates Whitman’s tendency to find beauty in the common and mundane.