Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 30, no. 3

O'Brien, Geoffrey G.

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THE RHYME OF THE LEFT MARGIN
Geoffrey G. o’Brien
My topic is the left margin, that space of reinauguration that has tra-
ditionally been emphasized, perhaps almost by default, when a poet 
deliberately refrains from using traditional right margin resources such 
as rhyme or even meter which, though everywhere in the line, finds its 
identity only when completed at line’s end. I’ll be looking at Whitman’s 
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” for what it can tell us about left-margin ac-
tivation, and its relation to an abstention from other poetic forms and 
figures. I want to talk about the left margin not merely because it’s crucial 
in this poem (and most other Whitman poems) but because, as the site 
of an intense repetition, it actually doesn’t indicate an abstention from 
right-margin resources so much as a reproduction of their effects by other 
means and in a new location. This matters to me as both a practitioner 
and reader for two reasons: 1)  because we seem to be living in a time in 
which most of those right-margin forms feel unavailable—overfreighted 
with bad histories or standing as nostalgic, falsifying pattern-consolations 
for the abyssal complexity and damage of everyday life; and 2) because 
even if rhyme and meter are currently nearly vitiated, I think their effects 
must be produced by other means; otherwise poetry suffers an actual 
loss of system complexity rather than simply enjoying a permutation of 
method. Poetry can ecstatically or soberly give up any form, but when 
it gives up Form I’m not sure it’s still a genre. 
The original title of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” was “Sun-Down 
Poem.” The present title, which dates from 1860, preserves in occulted 
fashion the therelessness of literary signs and scenes so palpable in the 
original; all titles, however deictic or world-building, imply the word 
“Poem” after them and so establish literary space at space’s expense, an 
immaterial commons in which we read not of things but of dispositions 
towards the thingly. But in changing the title to “Crossing Brooklyn 
Ferry” Whitman also announces the literarity of place in more round-_________________
EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay inaugurates a new occasional series that invites prominent poets 
to investigate Whitman’s poetics. Geoffrey G. O’Brien teaches at the University of California, 
Berkeley, and is the author of three books of poetry: The Guns and Flags Project (2002), Green 
and Gray (2007), and Metropole (2011). O’Brien’s next collection, People on Sunday, will be 
published by Wave in 2013. “The Rhyme of the Left Margin” is based on a talk delivered in 
the “Poem Present” Series at the University of Chicago in 2009.
Poets on Whitman
94
about fashion, through a serious pun on both crossing and ferrying. It’s 
a poem that records a difficulty with figure, specifically with metaphor, 
and evidences a desire to abstain almost entirely from it, to cross meta-
phor’s ferrying, to thwart its conceptual crossings of terms. In “Specimen 
Days” Whitman said of ferries, “I have always had a passion for ferries; 
to me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems.” 
What ferries apparently do is afford a certain kind of poem via a certain 
kind of motion—“streaming” as a metonymic motion across a local 
space or at least a selected, representative perceptual inventory of that 
space, a catalogic in which each set member—tide, wake, barge, flag, 
foundry—contributes to the dissolution of actual place but in so doing 
convenes a commons not only immaterial but atemporal or transhis-
torical, allowing access to a placeless place at any time. In other words, 
Whitman will prefer metonymic streaming to metaphorical crossing in 
this poem because he thinks deictic indications of an unvisitable place 
allow others—readers, future travelers—a better entry to this commons 
than the private or idiosyncratic transmutations of metaphor. 
But what does that have to do with the left margin? It’s simply 
the site of another important –phor: anaphora. Instead of a metaphor’s 
ferrying-across we have in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” anaphora’s con-
stant vertical stream of carrying-back, so that each line participant in 
anaphoresis is a kind of motion that carries with it the threat and ecstasy 
of getting nowhere, of getting to get nowhere again and again and leave 
that thereless there again. Further, anaphora doesn’t only emphasize 
both a vertical patterning of line beginnings but the horizontal motion 
of reading across the lines in order to get back to the next emphatic re-
beginning. So that a metonymic motion across the possible inventory 
of things seen in a specific time and place, say Brooklyn in the 1850s, 
while standing motionless on a moving boat, is attended by an empha-
sized motion across the material space of the page and the line in order 
to return to more such streaming motions. One crosses a line that tells 
of a crossing but, just as the poem’s title fantasizes that the crossing is 
eternal, one ends up at the beginning again. The form has the potential 
for infinite extension but is dependent on a persistent return to its launch, 
what John Ashbery will later call “the mooring of starting out.” This is 
Whitman’s idea of time travel, a literary passage through no place that 
by getting nowhere gets everywhen—the poem as time machine with 
both abstention from metaphor and an attention to anaphora as the 
controls.  As section 3 begins “It avails not, time nor place—distance 
avails not, / I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever 
so many generations hence.” And “just” to prove it, anaphora breaks out 
at the beginning of section 4, a series of Justs repeating enough times 
in succession that we hear them not only as a way of conjuring likeness 
or kinship across persons without eradicating difference (“Just as you 
95
look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of 
steamboats, I look’d”), but also as an assertion of the justness or justice 
of that way of seeing seeing. Men and women are iterably linked across 
generations by their iterable access to a passage over and through the 
details of world. Put another way, the only way to turn the unpredictable 
substitutions of metaphor into a public good is by using metonymy. As 
the eye roves across boats, and up or down their masts and pipes, it es-
tablishes an untransfigured (though radically selected) list of those details 
that theoretically any other person could also perform. It produces, in 
other words, a substitutability of person by indicating perceptual surfaces 
while refusing to substitute one thing for another.
And again, to go back to section 2 for a second, we can see the 
canniness of Whitman’s resolutely linking metonymy to anaphora, in the 
section in which the form is first introduced. Just as metonymy tells the 
parts without transforming them, so anaphora, as the brute repetition 
of identity, of a term, does not substitute, it accretes, it emphasizes, it 
varies across each local lineal environment, but it doesn’t replace itself. 
In other words, it makes a crowd of exchangeable yet serial terms. And 
here in the second section we get a cascade of definite articles fronting a 
crowd of parts which then gives way to a crowd of literal “Others”—an 
orchestrated hand-off from the definite to the indefinite that is also a 
drama of form’s migration from the right margin to the left. After 5 lines 
beginning with  “The,” introducing nearly metaphorically the metonymic 
aspirations of the poem, its telling of “glories strung like beads on my 
smallest sights and hearings,” the sixth line adumbrates the next ana-
phoric chain by starting “The others” and, after asserting a “tie” between 
temporally isolated others, the stanza ends with that very word “others” 
on the right margin only to have the poem “cross” the whitespace to find 
the same word waiting for it on the left, where it will, just like “The,” 
serve as a formal device for introducing the available sites of percepts of 
place, what Bertrand Russell would later call “sensibilia,” or “unsensed 
sense-data”; the anaphora will then model the substitutability of persons 
capable of pursuing those percepts. “Other” is Whitman’s pronoun for 
both the person substituted out and the person substituted in, every-
one is that other; crossing is the verb for that just and never completed 
substitution of persons, and the ferry, both place and boat, figure and 
sign, the streaming, never-failing poem, is the insubstantial commons 
of perception where such substitutions can transpire. Whitman then is 
not himself representative, he is merely if incantatorily indicative, on the 
left margin of a line that will continue after him and which preceded 
him, but also able to “Stop somewhere waiting for you” by sending his 
bodiless form through time.
We also see in this section anaphora’s substitution of one term for 
another within a continuity of pattern. The poem streams through a left-
96
margin emphasis while moving from “The” to “Other.” Much like the 
good substitutability of person the poem prefers to metaphor’s private 
transmutations of figure, substitution can happen as long as it’s linked 
to metonymy or anaphora. You can use a simile if it’s to describe the 
“glories like beads” of multiple “seeings and hearings” and you can see 
that episodality of attention as a figure for anaphora as well. Perhaps 
we could even say that for Whitman anaphora is the visual figure for a 
democracy of perception and metonymy the narration of that democ-
racy. 
Which would explain another key moment in the poem where good 
substitutions of various kinds happen via an abstention from explicit 
metaphor and an emphasis on anaphora. In Section 3, after the series 
of Justs comes a line beginning with “I,” which speaks of crossing “the 
river of old.” Then we get a new vertical river of anaphora where each 
anaphoric term not only repeats very few times before giving way to the 
next, but we also encounter a powerful expansion of what can count as 
anaphora, because, as we move from Watched to three Saws in a row to 
“Had my eyes dazzled” to four Look’ds in a row back to Saw twice before 
resolving back to the familiar The, we move from an anaphora of term 
to an anaphora of class, in which synonyms for visual tellings (cf. “see-
ings”) have their time and place, tell the selected metonymies of “parts 
of bodies” and “white sails” and “rigging,” and then let other words tell 
other parts of the witnessable scene. It’s as though anaphora’s internal 
logic led to synonymy, as each term’s new context morphs into an ability 
to replace the vision-term entirely while maintaining a kinship, a “tie” as 
Whitman might put it, with the others. Even the lines that don’t partici-
pate in even mild anaphora, whose first words are not repetends, seem 
part of it retroactively: I as the site of iterable observation and Watched 
as potential anaphor and “Had my eyes dazzled” as phrasal substitution 
for any of the other repetends of vision.
Beyond these good substitutions, term for term, and term for class, 
and the “flags of all nations” rather than any one of them, there is also 
a figuring of the poet that verges on metaphor, that dares the reader to 
metaphorize him and dares him not to, and thus is worth looking at 
briefly. When the poet looks “at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round 
the shape of my head in the sunlit water” he is tempting us to make 
of him a Jesus, that master-figure for substitution, or that other one, a 
monarch. But in either case, the figure is only a reflection and the halo 
simply centrifugal spokes of light pointing along other vectors of vision 
to other great or small parts of the scene, and the crown a dissolving 
crown, as protean and inconstant as the water’s surface in the “white 
wake left by the passage.” Whitman is a lowercase christ rather than the 
Christ, a king only insofar as he’s able to see himself as other, as reflec-
tion, at a distance that “avails not” not because it is instantly crossable, 
97
but because there is a metonymic method of crossing it that makes it 
permanently available to any person to revisit and there be crowned as 
the king of the others, of which she herself is one.
I want to move now to the last section of the poem, where we ex-
perience a further expansion of anaphora, from an anaphora of class 
or synonymy to an anaphora of mood. This section begins with a set of 
imperatives that are perhaps the least imperious in all of literature. From 
“Flow on river!” to “Live, old life!” all of the instructions are pyrrhic, 
all of the commands are already being followed. It is for me a mark of 
the poem’s formal power and ambitions that one doesn’t instantly ex-
perience as absurd “Live, old life” or any of the other demands that the 
world keep doing what it is already doing. The softness of the anaphora, 
a repetition of grammatical mood rather than term, echoes the softness 
of the enjoinders, in the service of yet more metonymic and deictic pre-
sentation of place, and the dissolution and reconstitution of that place as 
literature. For Whitman, such faint linking and such muted commands 
distinguish his form from the imperious Eucharist of metaphor, which 
tells a thing to suddenly be another rather than lovingly telling its parts 
and their shading off into the next available object or person. In the last 
section of this poem, the poet commands the space he’s brought under 
description to be itself, so that it can wait, untransfigured, for anybody 
else to experience. Even the authority of a lowercase jesus is told to go 
but only told to go by being what it was, light:  “Diverge, fine spokes of 
light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sunlit water!” 
These spokes, a fine play on speaking as well as a direction to move 
radially into everywhere else, only diverge rather than suffer expulsion, 
and leave the poet’s head in the water only as, just as, they would leave 
anyone else’s, and remain attached to that from which they diverge.
Then, with these commands all followed because already underway, 
the anaphora shudders, and falls forward into a line become clear apos-
trophe:  “Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are”.  The 
line also indicates another consequence of this new class of anaphora, 
that it has been engaging in an activity verging on pathetic fallacy, on the 
lending of agency to the features of place. But is that metaphor here? Not 
exactly. I would describe it instead as the instantiation of a commons, 
the filling of space with potential persons. Because there is no place in 
literary language, Whitman here actually addresses the crowds of ferry-
goers and readers who might encounter a river mid-flow and an old life 
living itself. Here, the pathetic fallacy doubles as, or finds its verity in, 
the identification of the future persons who will witness similar seeings 
and hearings and who are therefore already, in Whitman’s now, inside the 
things they will see later, all of this functioning also as an assertion of the 
continuity, the beadedness of such perceptual encounters with the world. 
Commanding appearance is simply to indicate potential experience and 
98
to indicate potential experience is to suggest or at least fantasize the 
good substitutability of the others who could have their eyes be dazzled 
by it. At this point there is no difference between pathetic fallacy and 
metonymy, because there are no things, there is just the poem as the 
commons of potential relations between all its parts, great and small. 
Now, after staging the breakdown of an anaphora of apparent pa-
thetic fallacy, the poem can permit itself any figure, as though it refused 
to fetishize any one formal procedure for inviting the reader to enter its 
time machine. It tells its own methods to disperse and arrives at one of its 
most famous phrases, which happens to be an unabashed metaphor. After 
the penultimate stanza ends in the brief reestablishment of an anaphora 
of pyrrhic command, on the line “Keep your places, objects than which 
none else is more lasting,”  the poem arrives at the line whose right margin 
offers an undeniable metaphor:  “You have waited, you always wait, you 
dumb, beautiful ministers”.  The obvious antecedent of these ministers is 
the “objects” of the line above it, so this phrase is guilty of participating 
in apostrophe, pathetic fallacy, you name it. But the figure is as strange as 
it is conventional—how can a minister be “dumb”?—like and unlike the 
“blind mouths” of the bad clergy in Milton’s “Lycidas,” another poem 
of water and roving, peripatetic form, these beautiful ministers make a 
figure that is difficult to cognize yet easy to comprehend. They are dumb 
because they are objects but they are ministers because they are in the 
poem. Just as light can be “spokes” around a head, objects can speak, 
can only speak, when in the poem, where all things are not what they 
are, are not even appearances that could indicate what they are. They 
are only poetic signs, which are also dumb but which can speak, and the 
place where persons can meet and share their Just-Ases with each other. 
And just like the physical facts of world which wait without any 
agency for people to perceive them, the “sensibilia” or “unsensed sense-
data” of a place, so too do the poetic signs that dissolve that world in the 
act of referring to it wait. They wait to issue the soft command to read 
them, to do what you are already doing, and they do this under the title 
“Sun-Down Poem” and through a renaming, and revisions across the 
editions, the generations, of Leaves of Grass, in a kind of immortality that 
depends on having no body but staying in the earthly heaven of text, on a 
boat that is no metaphor, permanently crossing between two shores. And 
there are two shores reached at the end of the poem but they are sounds 
not places, and they sound only the poetic sign while it talks of offering 
metonymy rather than whole place. In a repetition free of both anaphora 
and metaphor, the last two lines say “furnish your parts” enough times, 
twice, that we can cross from furnish to your until we hear the “shore” 
formed in the crossing and the open “your” inside it.


English

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