Commentary on "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest,
and the Road Unknown":
In a study of poetry, photography and war, Timothy Sweet writes on Whitman's poem:
'A March in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,' a vignette from the life of an anonymous soldier-poet, thematizes the potential unrepresentability of war . . . The narrator's experience of seeing the violated bodies of his comrades is unrepresentable and yet somehow partly represented. The poet appeals twice to the inexpressibility of the scene, which justifies the interdicted representation. A wound is named, but not described in any detail. In this poem Whitman comes much closer to a representation of violated bodies of soldiers than in the poems of the body politic, theodicy, and exchange, in which the representational structure functions to obscure the reality of violence through a redescriptive transference. Here the sense of fragmentation which prohibits full visual or textual representation--"beyond all the pictures and poems"--is self-reflexively acknowledged, and thus never quite recuperated. But the march and the narrative can continue after a significant moment shared by the narrator and a wounded soldier, which provides a closure to the scene of "postures beyond description" that threatens the possibility of representation. In the [final lines] Whitman appeals to the adhesive topos to restore the narrative structure. The image of the closing eyes prefigures the interdiction of any further representation of the scene of horror. The poet's own eyes are closed--by the "darkness," but also by his bond with the soldier produced in the adhesive moment. The love of comrades, if it cannot actually reunify the fragmented body of the dying soldier, at least allows the completion of the poetic structure: the narrative is restored and the narrator, himself both a poet and a military representative of his country, can continue to execute his two respresentational activities. That his efficacy as a political representative depends on the possibility of his own death (prefigured in the scene itself, which interrupts the narrative) is an irony on which he does not comment. The adhesive structures of representation will function, it seems, with or without the presence of this soldier-poet. (Sweet 42-43)
In a landmark study of Whitman as a political poet, Betsy Erkkila offers this anaylsis of the poem:
The individual is similarly swept along by the 'resistless' force of history in "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown.' . . . The church-made hospital, where pews become beds for wounded soldiers, the gleams of light amid 'shadows of deepest, deepest black,' and the hellish cast of flam and smoke all reflect an ambivalent response to the war as a site of redemption and a descent into hell. . . . The lily white of the youngster's face contrasts with the hellish glow of the scene, suggesting a Chirst-like suffering and redemption. The soldier appears to be a countervailing figure, relieving the scene of 'deepest, deepest black' by an act of compassion and love. But the gesture is only temporary, perhaps meaningless.
Beyond 'all the pictures and poems ever made,' the bloody 'sight' of war that Whitman describes almost overwhelms him, making it impossible to write. His poet-soldier tries to 'absorb' the scene, but the 'postures beyond description' come out as a chaos of sight, sound, and smell . . . The presentation of the soldiers as a crowd of 'bloody forms' and the insistent repetition of the indefinite pronoun some emphasize both the numbers and the anonymity of the war dead.
Unrelieved by any larger teleology that would give meaning and significance to the 'bloody forms' of war, the soldier is swept back into the ranks marching in darkness along an unknown road . . . The half-smile of the dying lad represensts a sustaining gesture of comradeship, love, and human affirmation, shooting its light into the surrounding darkness as the soldier falls back into line and speeds onward into the night. The almost-hypnotic repetition of the word marching impels the final lines forward with the resistless motion and beat of an army corps on the march. As the controlling image of Whitman's Civil War poems, the figure of the march has a dual suggestiveness as both an army march and the march of humanity. But in the war poems, the march is no longer along the sun-drenched vistas of 'Song of the Open Road.' In the poems of Drum-Taps and Sequel;, as in America in the post-Civil War period, the direction of the march is uncertain and the road is unknown. (Erkkila 223-225).
In a study of Whitman's war writings, Robert Leigh Davis writes of "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest":
Above all, however, Whitman builds the symbolic mobility of nursing into his Civil War narratives and poetry. Exploring key moments of crossing, Whitman defies closed or irreversible cultural systems: the morally resonant polarities of of Nightingale's nursing, the Manichean dualism of separate spheres, the melodramatic rivalry of the House Divided. Placing his hospital "at the crossing roads", as he does in "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest," Whitman intervenes in the oppositional crisis of his culture by seeking to change habits of thought structuring that opposition . . . The "old church, at the crossing roads" is a place of social and moral intersection. Blurring the boundaries between body and spirit, sacred and profane, Whitman's church-hospital is the site of his democratic faith. It is a neutral territory where contrary states are intermingled or combined. (61)