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    A Study Guide for Walt Whitman's "Cavalry Crossing a Ford"
    A Study Guide for Walt Whitman's "Cavalry Crossing a Ford"
    A Study Guide for Walt Whitman's "Cavalry Crossing a Ford"
    Ebook30 pages21 minutes

    A Study Guide for Walt Whitman's "Cavalry Crossing a Ford"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Walt Whitman's "Cavalry Crossing a Ford," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 26, 2016
    ISBN9781535820561
    A Study Guide for Walt Whitman's "Cavalry Crossing a Ford"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Walt Whitman's "Cavalry Crossing a Ford" - Gale

      1

      Cavalry Crossing a Ford

      Walt Whitman

      1865

      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 first-person 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 sees as he sees it.

      Perhaps the most interesting facet of the poem concerns the perspective from which the scene is observed and presented. The panoramic quality of the images suggests that the observer (implicitly, the reader) is viewing the scene from some distance. The whole of the cavalry troop is seen at once, as though the reader were looking down from some great height. However, from this vantage the reader is ultimately unable to distinguish the particulars of the scene from the larger whole. Each individual soldier becomes merely part of the they that makes up the entire cavalry, and no particular individual is given special attention or distinction in the scene. The climax of the poem then comes in the last line, when suddenly the focus is on the guidon flags. While the reader has thus

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