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In the poem "Jacob Goodpasture," is Goodpasture a father of a son in the war or a soldier himself?

Due to the fourth line of the poem, it is clear Goodpasture is the father of a Civil War soldier:



When they buried my soldier son [my emphasis]


To the call of trumpets and the sound of drums


My heart broke beneath the weight


Of eighty years, and I cried:


"Oh, son who died in a cause unjust!


In the strife of Freedom slain!"



The fifth and sixth lines detail Goodpasture's experience of his son's funeral. He tells us he was "eighty years" old at the time, which would have made it impossible for him to be the soldier.


Your confusion may be due to the use of quotes within the first-person narration. The use of voice changes only in relation to time, but it is always the same man speaking—recounting what he said at the beginning of the Civil War ("[w]hen Fort Sumter fell and the war came"), and what he said at his son's burial. 

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