“A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” Introduction

• "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown" is American poet Walt Whitman's horrified look at the disasters of war. The poem's speaker, a soldier retreating from a lost battle, encounters a makeshift field hospital in an old church. The carnage he sees inside is so appalling that he feels he can hardly find words to describe it. Whitman, who served as a nurse during the American Civil War, based this poem on a soldier's first-hand account of the Battle of White Oaks Church, and on his own time working in military hospitals. He first published it in his 1865 collection Drum-Taps.

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“A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” Summary

• We're on a difficult, painful march through unfamiliar territory, making our way through thick woods, our steps quiet in the dark. Our army has been badly beaten; only a few of us, sad, silent, and battered, are left to retreat. We do so until after midnight, when we see the faint lights of a building, find it in a clearing in the woods, and then stop there. It's an old church at a crossroads, turned into an improvised hospital. When I go in just for a minute, I see something that no poem or picture could ever capture. Deep, dark shadows are barely illuminated by lamps and candles, and by one smoky torch shooting red flames. By that light, I can vaguely see huge numbers of people lying on the floor and the pews. Right at my feet, more clearly, I can see a soldier—just a boy—bleeding to death from a gunshot wound in his belly. I manage to stop the bleeding, though not for long. The boy's face is lily-white. Before I leave I look around to try to take in what I'm seeing. There are all kinds of people here, strewn around with indescribable expressions and in indescribable positions. Most are hard to see in the darkness. Some of them are dead. There are surgeons performing operations, assistants holding up lights, the smell of anesthesia and blood. Oh, the crowd of gory bodies—so many that the churchyard is full of them, too. Some people are lying directly on the ground, some on stretchers; some are sweating and convulsing as they die. I hear screams, and the doctors' shouted instructions; I see the surgical instruments glittering in the torchlight. As I tell this story now, I see these things again, and smell those smells—and finally hear my commander outside shouting, "Back to the march, men, get in line." Before I go, I bend down to the dying boy at my feet. His eyes are open, and he gives me a faint smile. Then his eyes fall gently shut, and I rush out into the dark. I march again, always in darkness, among my fellow soldiers, marching along down that unfamiliar road.

“A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” Themes

• 

  The Horror, Chaos, and Trauma of War

  Whitman's poem records the hellish violence, pain, and terror of the Civil War. The speaker, a soldier retreating from a terrible battle, describes encountering a field hospital in which countless men lie wounded and dying—a sight whose horror is “beyond all the pictures and poems ever made.” Paying special attention to a young boy dying of a gut shot, this speaker’s story suggests that war is unspeakably horrific and cruel, indiscriminately destroying even the most innocent life and leaving survivors traumatized.

  The poem’s speaker has already seen plenty of dreadful things when this poem begins: he’s one of the survivors of an “army foil’d with loss severe,” retreating from a defeat in battle. It’s not the battlefield that stays with him, however, but a hospital. As he and his comrades reach a “large old church” that has become an “impromptu hospital,” he finds that this holy place has become something rather like an outpost of Hell. With “shadows of deepest, deepest black” lit only by a “pitchy torch” that emits “wild red flame,” it’s jam-packed with horribly wounded men, a “crowd of bloody forms” that overflows into the yard outside.

  So much suffering, the speaker says, is “beyond” art: he can’t even begin to capture just how awful it was. The war’s horrors are so great they’re almost unspeakable.

  Amid all the dying men, the speaker is most struck by a young boy, a “mere lad” dying of a gut wound. The speaker tries to give this young man a little comfort, but all he can do is “stanch the blood temporarily” before the boy’s eyes “close” forever. With a face as “white as a lily,” this youthful, innocent figure seems to symbolize all the countless young men whom war chews up. Part of what’s so terrible about war, his death suggests, is that it mercilessly and arbitrarily destroys goodness and youth.

  Worse still, war scars even those who survive. The soldier telling this story may have made it out alive, but he’ll also carry the traumatic memories of the hospital with him for the rest of his life. Even as he tells his story now, he can “resume” the sights and sounds of that awful night as if he were still there.

  All this horror is especially appalling because it’s part of a march down a “road unknown.” The poor men fighting in this war can’t know when, where, or whether this carnage will ever stop. The poem thus becomes, not just an all-too-real record of the Civil War in particular, but an anti-war poem in general, suggesting that war is a futile, meaningless trudge down the ugliest and cruelest of paths.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown”

• Lines 1-5

  A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
  A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
  Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,
  Till after midnight glimmer upon us the lights of a dim-lighted building,
  We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building,

  As the poem begins, a soldier is on the retreat. He and his companions have suffered a "loss severe," badly losing a battle, and only a "sullen remnant" (a few gloomily silent survivors), "hard-prest" and exhausted, remain. They're marching through dark woods on a "road unknown," going who knows where.

  Notably, they're doing all of this in the present tense. Using his customary long, swinging lines of free verse, Walt Whitman puts readers right in the moment with this soldier, tracking his progress on what will turn out to be one of the more terrible nights of his life.

  Whitman usually wrote in his own voice, but this poem is a story told by a character. It's based on real events observed by a real person, a wounded soldier named Milton Roberts whom Whitman met while he was volunteering in military hospitals during the American Civil War. There's a documentary quality here: Whitman is making a record of the real-life horrors of his era.

  In these first lines, though, this poem feels as if it could take place during any war, anywhere—or as if it could be a sinister fairy tale, for that matter.

  As the soldiers make their way through dark woods at midnight—so far, so mythic!—they at last encounter a "glimmer" of light. Not much of it, though: they see only the "lights of a dim-lighted building." They find that building in a clearing in the woods and stop there.

  Listen to the way the speaker uses epistrophe here:

  Till after midnight glimmer upon us the lights of a dim-lighted building,
  We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building,

  This gloomy building, the repetition suggests, is going to be important. It's also ominous. A few dim lights don't promise much warmth and comfort for a band of exhausted marchers. The retreating soldiers, readers might already suspect, aren't in for anything good in there.

• Lines 6-10

  ’Tis a large old church at the crossing roads, now an impromptu hospital
  Entering but for a minute I see a sight beyond all the pictures and poems ever made,
  Shadows of deepest, deepest black, just lit by moving candles and lamps,
  And by one great pitchy torch stationary with wild red flame and clouds of smoke,
  By these, crowds, groups of forms vaguely I see on the floor, some in the pews laid down,

  

  

• Lines 11-12

  At my feet more distinctly a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen,)
  I stanch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white as a lily,)

  

  

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• Lines 13-19

  Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o’er the scene fain to absorb it all,
  Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity, some of them dead,
  Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of blood,
  The crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms, the yard outside also fill’d,
  Some on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the death-spasm sweating,
  An occasional scream or cry, the doctor’s shouted orders or calls,
  The glisten of the little steel instruments catching the glint of the torches,

  

  

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• Lines 20-25

  These I resume as I chant, I see again the forms, I smell the odor,
  Then hear outside the orders given, Fall in, my men, fall in;
  But first I bend to the dying lad, his eyes open, a half-smile gives he me,
  Then the eyes close, calmly close, and I speed forth to the darkness,
  Resuming, marching, ever in darkness marching, on in the ranks,
  The unknown road still marching.

  

  

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“A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” Symbols

• 

  The Dying Boy

  Looking around at a room crammed full of dying men, the speaker singles out one person in particular: a boy lying at his feet, dying of a gunshot wound to the gut. With his face pale, delicate, and innocent as a "lily," this boy symbolizes all the heartbreakingly young men that war destroys. In a poem where the speaker never discusses the war's larger purpose (or even mentions what war he's describing), this boy's death feels particularly arbitrary and horrific, suggesting that all such deaths are a dreadful waste of young life and potential.

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“A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Imagery

  This poem's imagery presents the horrors of war through the traumatized speaker's eyes. His memories of what he saw in a makeshift hospital one terrible night veer from foggy, overwhelmed impressions of hellish crowds to appallingly precise visions of glinting surgical instruments.

  When he first arrives in the "dim-lighted" hospital, for instance, he sees a picture straight out of Dante's Inferno (which, not coincidentally, Whitman was reading at the time he wrote this poem). "Shadows of deepest, deepest black" are illuminated by "one great pitchy torch," a smoking beacon that emits "wild red flame and clouds of smoke." He remembers this sinister light in far more detail than he remembers what it illuminated: the "groups of forms" that lie groaning around the room appear only "vaguely" in the smoky light and in his memory. This movement from the specific to the vague suggests that much of what the speaker saw was just too terrible either to describe or to remember clearly; his traumatized mind blanks some of the specifics out, leaving only a nightmarish general impression behind.

  That doesn't stop him from having nastily specific memories of what it was like in there: the "smell of ether" and the "odor of blood" return to him even as he describes the experience, as if he never really escaped. The "glisten of the little steel instruments" as desperate surgeons try to operate on dying men sticks with him, too.

  By describing the room around the "crowd of the bloody forms" in more detail than he describes most of the dying or dead men, the speaker invites readers to imagine horrors beyond imagining and "beyond description."

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• Simile

  

  
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• Repetition

  

  

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• Parallelism

  

  

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• Asyndeton

  

  

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"A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Ranks
• Hard-prest
• Foil'd
• Sullen
• Remnant
• Impromptu
• Pitchy
• Stationary
• Pews
• Stanch
• O'er
• Fain
• Obscurity
• Ether
• Death-spasm
• Resume
• Fall in

• Lines of soldiers.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown”

• Form

  This poem uses Whitman's trademark form: one long stanza of free verse. In fact, this poem isn't just one long stanza, but one long sentence, evoking the nightmarish, inescapable "march" of the Civil War.

  At only 25 lines, this is one of Whitman's shorter poems; many of his most famous works are long, sprawling, mystical tales. That brevity suits this poem's project. The speaker knows that the horrors he's describing are "beyond description," so he doesn't linger over them for long or give much color commentary: he only tells the bare, appalling facts of what he saw.

  Unusually for Whitman, this poem takes on the voice of a distinct character: a soldier based on a Civil War veteran, Milton Roberts, whom Whitman met while he was working as a nurse.

• Meter

  This poem is written in Whitman's characteristic free verse. Whitman was a pioneer of this form, and he used it like no one else. Though there's no regular meter here, the poem still has a hypnotic, pulsing momentum, driven along by chant-like repetitions and long runs of asyndeton.

  For example, listen to what happens when the speaker begins to describe the things he saw in the depths of the hospital (lines 14-16):

  Faces, || varieties, || postures beyond description, || most in obscurity, || some of them dead,
  Surgeons operating, || attendants holding lights, || the smell of ether, || the odor of blood,
  The crowd, || O the crowd of the bloody forms, || the yard outside also fill’d,

  The caesurae here divide this catalogue of horrors into small, rhythmic moments, like flashes of nightmare; the asyndeton means that there's no "and" to reassure readers that this list of awful sights might be about to come to an end.

• Rhyme Scheme

  This free verse poem doesn't use a rhyme scheme. However, it still uses artfully echoing sounds: it's full of atmospheric assonance and alliteration. When the speaker describes his terrible march down a "road unknown," for instance, that long assonant /oh/ feels like a quiet moan of pain and fear. And the sinister /gl/ alliteration in the "glisten of the little steel instruments catching the glint of the torches" suggests darting, uneasy flickers of light over bloody scalpels.

“A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” Speaker

• The poem's speaker is a soldier describing his harrowing memories of a Civil War field hospital. Though he says that what he saw there was "beyond all the pictures and poems ever made," his words do a pretty good job of conjuring the overwhelming horrors he saw in the shadowy building.

  What the speaker doesn't say about what he saw is just as meaningful as what he does say. He never says outright, This hospital was one of the most horrible things I've ever seen. He merely describes quick impressions, like flashes of nightmare: "the smell of ether," "the glisten of the little steel instruments," "the odor of blood." These awful glimpses—and his insistence that what he saw was "beyond description," more and worse than he could ever say—suggest that the reality was utterly hellish.

  The poem's horrible verisimilitude is drawn from a first-hand report: Whitman based this poem on a conversation with a soldier, Milton Roberts, who witnessed just such an overwhelmed hospital after the Battle of White Oaks Church.

“A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” Setting

• This poem takes place during the American Civil War. Its setting, however, at first feels timeless as a nightmare. The speaker, one of a column of soldiers retreating from a serious defeat, stumbles across a "dim-lighted building," a church at a crossroads in thick woods at midnight. It's the stuff of a dark fairy tale.

  Inside the church, things feel no less grim and mythic. By the smoky, reddish light of a "torch," the speaker sees a scene from what might as well be Hell. Heaps of dead and dying men lie wherever there's room; a few doctors try to save them, but they're clearly fighting a losing battle. Only the mention of "ether" (an old-fashioned anesthetic) and surgical instruments places this scene in the 19th century. Everything else is just a vision of the everlasting horror of war.

Literary and Historical Context of “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown”

• Literary Context

  Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is often seen as a founding father of the 19th-century American Transcendentalist movement. His poetry, imbued with mysticism and firmly rooted in the natural landscape, was an inspiration to fellow American writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

  But, like his contemporary Emily Dickinson, Whitman was also one of a kind, standing apart from the literary world around him with his inimitable style. Whitman pioneered free verse at a time when most poetry was still bound by metrical convention, and he remains an acknowledged master of the form.

  This poem was first collected in Whitman's 1865 book Drum-Taps, in which Whitman reflected on the horrors of the American Civil War. At the time he wrote this poem, Whitman was volunteering in military hospitals and carrying around a copy of Dante's Inferno, sometimes making notes on his conversations with wounded soldiers in the margins. Dante's influence is clear in this poem's description of the makeshift hospital's lurid, hellish light.

  More than 200 years after his birth, Whitman is still one of the world's best-known and most beloved poets. Some of his poems are so famous they're almost proverbial: for instance, "I am large, I contain multitudes" is a line from his "Song of Myself."

  Historical Context

  Walt Whitman didn't fight in the American Civil War himself. (One of his friends once said that imagining the pacifistic Whitman on a battlefield was as incongruous as imagining Jesus Christ holding a gun.) But he saw plenty of its horrors when he volunteered in military hospitals. While working as a nurse, he took extensive notes on the conversations he had with wounded soldiers. This poem is based on his conversation with a soldier named Milton Roberts, who would himself lose a leg not long after his terrible "march" past a makeshift hospital.

  Whitman hated both war and slavery, and he felt great hope and relief when the anti-slavery Union won the war in 1865, only a few months before Drum-Taps (the collection in which this poem appeared) was published. But his relief was short-lived. He was devastated when, shortly after the end of the war, Lincoln was assassinated. Whitman had deeply admired and sympathized with Lincoln. (And the feeling was mutual: Lincoln is known to have read poems from Whitman's major work Leaves of Grass aloud.)

  Whitman would reflect on Lincoln's death and the lasting trauma of the Civil War for the rest of his life; his grief inspired some of his finest poetry.

More “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” Resources

• External Resources

  • Drum-Taps — See images of a first edition of Drum-Taps, the important collection in which Whitman first published this poem.

  • A Brief Biography — Learn more about Whitman's life via the Poetry Foundation.

  • The Poem Aloud — Listen to a moving performance of the poem.

  • The Walt Whitman Archive — Visit the Walt Whitman Archive for a wealth of resources on Whitman's life and work.

  • Some Background on the Poem — Learn about the conversation that inspired Whitman to write this poem.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by Walt Whitman

  • A Noiseless Patient Spider

  • Beat! Beat! Drums!

  • Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

  • I Hear America Singing

  • In Paths Untrodden

  • I Sing the Body Electric

  • O Captain! My Captain!

  • O Me! O Life!

  • One's-Self I Sing

  • The Voice of the Rain

  • When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

  • When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d