Cavalry Crossing a Ford (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Walt Whitman
- First Published: 1865
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
The Poem
Walt Whitman’s seven-line, one-sentence poem, “Cavalry Crossing a Ford,” records an ordinary scene in the American Civil War: the crossing of some unnamed river by a nondescript unit of cavalry. While the poem is ostensibly a simple sketch of these soldiers, by showing the soldiers from a variety of vantage points, the poet challenges the reader’s notion of the term “cavalry,” replacing the militaristic term with the image of a group of individual men.
As if the poet were drifting downstream in a canoe, the poem begins by viewing the soldiers from...
[The entire page is 1569 words long]
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