Introduction & Overview of Cavalry Crossing a Ford by Walt Whitman

Cavalry Crossing a Ford Introduction

"Cavalry Crossing a Ford" was first published in 1865 in Drum Taps, a collection of poems Whitman wrote during the Civil War, and was later incorporated into Leaves of Grass. The specific inspiration for this poem is not known, but Whitman did work as a nurse during the Civil War and may well have written this piece upon witnessing a cavalry troop crossing a river. Unlike the majority of poems Whitman penned during the Civil War, "Cavalry Crossing a Ford" does not use the firstperson "I" to put the scene it describes into a particular context. Instead of filtering the scene through a first-person narrator, the speaker of the poem journalistically presents a series of images and entreats the reader to "behold" the scene as though he or she were the first-person observer. It is as if the speaker imagined his reader standing beside him and seeing exactly what he...
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