Calvary Crossing a Ford

I am not going to lie, when I saw this poem I thought that I had the wrong one because of the length of it.  I am not complaining at all.  I was actually quite thrilled to see a really short story instead of the very long ones that we have been using practically the whole year.  It did not take half of an hour to read the story, so thank you very much.

At first I did not really know what was going on.  I was reading soldiers, or what the book called cavalry, were crossing a river (Whitman).  It makes sense now because the story was written sometime in the 1860's and this was around the time of the civil war.  Therefore, it must be a persons perspective from the civil war, of men crossing the River.  In comparison to Thoreau, there were more differences than there were similarities.    Thoreau wrote in one of his stories about an Army, but he went in a different way than what Whitman went with.  Walt Whitman went with the more happy approach to his style of writing as where Thoreau went with the more real, but he was not as happy with how he portrayed his style (Thoreau).  He took more of the pessimistic trail than Whitman did.  "He is morally insane, and incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, virtue and crime" (Nordau).  It explains why he did not go into the detail of things. Whitman went with more of an Emerson view of things.  I believe that Whitman kind of looked up to Emerson.  He wanted to be like him in some of the ways that he wrote.  It is like the younger sibling kind of thing.  All they want to do is be around you and do whatever you are doing.  Whitman began to take things that Emerson said and went and did them.  He went out to the battlefield and began observing what was going on and he went and wrote about it.  He just wanted to be like Emerson and he did a very good job of it.  He was also a very good follower because Emerson was a good guy to follow in the footsteps.

Thoreau, Henry D. "Thoreau's Civil Disobedience - with Annotated Text." The Thoreau Reader. Richard Lenat, 2009. Web. 24 Jan. 2012. .

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay, [c1900]; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/142/. [2/9/12


Nordau, Max. Degeneration, 1895: 230–32. Quoted as "On the Poetry of Walt Whitman" in Bloom, Harold, ed. Walt Whitman, Classic Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2007. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= CCVWaW040&SingleRecord=True (accessed February 9, 2012).