An Army Corps on the March
An Army Corps on the March - context Summary
Composed During the Civil War
Written amid the American Civil War and published in Drum-Taps (1865), this short poem depicts an advancing army corps through brisk, sensory detail: skirmishers, shots, dusty ranks, rumbling wheels, and sweating horses. Whitman’s experience serving as a wartime nurse informs the restrained yet observant tone, which records military movement without glorification and conveys the physical atmosphere and human cost of war through concrete, documentary description.
Read Complete AnalysesWITH its cloud of skirmishers in advance, With now the sound of a single shot, snapping like a whip, and now an irregular volley, The swarming ranks press on and on, the dense brigades press on; Glittering dimly, toiling under the sun—the dust-cover’d men, In columns rise and fall to the undulations of the ground, With artillery interspers’d—the wheels rumble, the horses sweat, As the army corps advances.
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