Cavalry Crossing a Ford

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Drum-Taps · 1865

A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,
They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun⁠—hark to the musical clank,
Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop to drink,
Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a picture, the negligent rest on the saddles,
Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford⁠—while,
Scarlet and blue and snowy white,
The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind.

Where this text comes from

First published in Drum-Taps (New York, 1865). Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the 1865 Drum-Taps scan. 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). “Cavalry Crossing a Ford.” First published in Drum-Taps (New York, 1865). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/cavalry-crossing-a-ford/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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