An Army Corps on the March

With 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.

Where this text comes from

First published in Leaves of Grass (New York, 1867). Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the Whitman Archive transcription of the 1867 Chapin edition (ppp.00473). The corpus text follows the 1891–92 arrangement, by which the poem had been revised. First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established. [1]

Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.

Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/walt-whitman_leaves-of-grass, drum-taps.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L7.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “An Army Corps on the March.” First published in Leaves of Grass (New York, 1867). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/an-army-corps-on-the-march/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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