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                                              E A S T   R I V E R

THE BRIDGE

Today's Crossing History The Builders Statistics Poetry Opening Day About

POETRY OF THE BRIDGE

Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face to face. Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose, And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

— Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1856)

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him, Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty— Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes As apparitional as sails that cross Some page of figures to be filed away; —Till elevators drop us from our day...

— Hart Crane, "To Brooklyn Bridge" (1930)

O harp and altar, of the fury fused, (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!) Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge, Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,— Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars, Beading thy path—condense eternity: And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

— Hart Crane, "To Brooklyn Bridge" (1930)

The Bridge in Literature

Walt Whitman wrote "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in 1856, before the bridge existed, celebrating the ferry crossing and imagining future travelers. The poem anticipates the bridge's purpose: connection across time.

Hart Crane's epic poem "The Bridge" (1930) uses the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol of American aspiration, a "steeled Cognizance" linking past and future, commerce and art, the mundane and the mythic.

The bridge has appeared in countless novels, films, and songs - from Henry Miller to Paul Auster, from "Saturday Night Fever" to "Once Upon a Time in America."