One sunny August day, Martha, with four young children in tow, was leaning against the railing at the front of the boat, relishing the rushing air hitting her face. Now living permanently in New York (from Puerto Rico), she needed to put her feelings into words: "It’s so wonderful, and it’s free ...I can come here whenever I want to, when I have time...it’s peaceful, it’s...it’s a kind of ...a kind of meditation..."

"And you can leave your problems behind you," a man next to her offered.

"There are no problems," Martha asserted in a strong, fervent voice, "only solutions."

Captain Jeff White was five years old when he made his first trip on the Staten Island Ferry. His father was a captain for 25 years and often took Jeff along for the ride. He gave him tours of the ferry, showed him how everything worked, and let him sit in the pilothouse, watching his dad steer the boat. Jeff decided then that that was what he would do when he grew up.

As soon as he finished high school, he joined the crew, working his way up from deck hand to mate and finally, eight years ago to captain. He turned the wheel so casually as he talked, guiding the ferry into the dock in New York Harbor without a hint of a bump, it looked as easy as maneuvering a rowboat. He loves the fresh air and all the people he meets and the feeling many of them have that the Staten Island ferry is something special.

One evening a young couple asked him to marry them. He explained that it would not be a legal marriage unless they were twelve miles offshore. But they said they didn’t care--they were having another wedding the next week--they just wanted to get married on the Staten Island Ferry. They begged him to do it. So he performed the ceremony.

Then not much has changed, it seems, since Edna Millay wrote "Recuerdo," Spanish for "I remember." In the summer of 1913, taking classes at Barnard, she met Salomon de la Selvea, a Nicaraguan poet who was teaching at Columbia. She writes about one night in their long friendship.

Millay knew how much a part of the message were sound and rhythm. Read "Recuerdo" aloud and feel the racking of the ferry in the repeating first lines. And listen to the rhyming couplets and consistent meter in each stanza; let them pull you back and forth with the couple sated by the joys of that night and each other. As Holly Peps says in her introduction to Early Poems, ....many of her poems…coax the language to sing."

We were very tired we were very merry-

At the time Ficke was a U.S. Army major bearing military dispatches to France. When he met Millay, they fell in love and had a brief but intense affair that affected them for the rest of their lives and about which both wrote idealizing sonnets.

As a humorist and satirist, Millay expressed the postwar feelings of young people, their rebellion against tradition, and their mood of freedom symbolized for many women by bobbed hair. These sentiments found expression in the opening poem of the collection, "First Fig," beginning playfully with the line, "My candle burns at both ends." Prudence, respectability, and constancy were denigrated in other poems of the volume. The cavalier attitude revealed in sonnets through lines like "Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!" and "I shall forget you presently, my dear" was new, presenting the woman as player in the love game no less than the man and frankly accepting biological impulses in love affairs.