Muriel Rukeyser and Walt Whitman

Muriel Rukeyser "Gauley Bridge"

       Camera at the crossing sees the city
       a street of wooden walls and empty windows,
       the door shut handless in the empty street,
       and the deserted Negro standing on the corner

      Whistling, the train comes from a long way away,
       slow, and the Negro watches it grow in the grey air,
       the hotel man makes a note behind his potted palm.

      What do you want - a cliff over a city?
      A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses?
      These people live here. ("Gauley Bridge" 1-4, 26-28, 38-40)

Walt Whitman "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

     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. ("Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" 1-10)

I chose these two poems because I thought they both had similarities in them.  When comparing these two poems, I picked out a couple of stanzas from each poem that I thought had similarities.  One aspect that I found similar with these two poems was the form of the poems.  It seemed as if both poems were telling a story and they were giving an account of a slave in Rukeyser's case and a man coming home from work in Whitman's poem.  Also, I noticed that both of them seemed to tell their poems through the eyes of a camera.  With Rukeyser's poem, she states, "camera at the crossing sees the city." In Whitman's poem, he doesn't say it in a straightforward way. However, by the way he says, "I see you face to face!" and provides us with imagery, he makes readers feel as if they are looking through a camera.  In addition, they both seem to be intrigued by the people they are writing about.  In Rukeyser's poem, she seems to focus on the slave and provides descriptions of him.  Also, in Whitman's poem, he states that he is curious about the men and women who are on the ferry-boats. Finally, in both Rukeyser's and Whitman's poems, they go from addressing one person to a larger group of people. In Rukeyser's poem, she goes from talking about one person (the slave) to "these people." In the same way, Whitman goes from talking about the man coming home from work on the ferry to the "crowds of men and women." The movement of both poems seems to move closer and then farther away (view from microscope to telescope).