"Calvary Crossing a Ford"

The short poem “Calvary Crossing a Ford” by Walt Whitman is basically talking about exactly what the title implies; it is about a contingency of soldiers crossing a shallow river, or ford. These particular soldiers are Civil War soldiers, which was going on when this poem was published.

The first two lines of the poem describe the line of soldiers that are waiting to cross the ford. He describes the line as “serpentine” and that they “wind betwixt green islands” (Whitman 1, 2). This descriptive style that involves nature is very similar to the writings of the authors in the Romanticism time period, especially the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau because they both tended to write most of their stories about nature. He is also very descriptive in the general sense because he uses so much detail about the colors and the soldiers in the scene. He mentions color when he talks about the “green islands,” the “flash” their guns produce in the sunlight, the “silvery river,” the “brown-faced men,” and of the group’s ”Scarlet, and blue, and snowy white” guidons. This style of very descriptive writing is very similar to the writing style of the romanticism time period.

While this writing shows similarities to Emerson and Thoreau’s writings, there are also some things that could be seen as being different to their writings. Just like Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Whitman is writing this about Civil War soldiers and it seems to me that he is writing about them in a favorable light. As I said in my blog about the Gettysburg Address, this is different than the writings of Thoreau because he did not like the idea of soldiers because they were basically the government’s “robots” and not all of them really wanted what they were fighting for, they were just going along with everyone else. On the other hand, since they are Union soldiers, which you can tell because they describe their guidon as red white and blue, it would be similar to Thoreau and Emerson because they were against slavery, which the Union forces were fighting to end.

Huff, Randall. "'Cavalry Crossing a Ford'." The Facts On File Companion to American Poetry, vol. 1. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007.Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay, [c1900]; Bartleby.com, 1999.