Abstract

Seamus heaney says that the best lyrics unite “reader and poet and poem in an experience of enlargement, of getting beyond the confines of the first person singular, of widening the lens of receptivity until it reaches and is reached by the world beyond the self.”1 In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,”2 the ferry crossing acts as a catalyst for meditations about the self, the interaction between self and other, their common experience of the physical world across time, and how to forge bonds that overcome the intense separateness of each individual. From these meditations arise an apprehension of time that blends past, present, and future; philosophical speculations about individual human identity during corporeal..