19 pages • 38 minutes read
Walt WhitmanO Captain! My Captain!
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1865A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Extended Metaphor
The extended metaphor or allegory allows a poet to express a feeling or tell a story without directly alluding to the particulars of the story. This poetic device allows the poet to create a poem based on the emotion of the situation instead of the specifics. The reasons a poet would do this are myriad.
The first reason is that metaphor allows for a more universal message. By changing the story from one about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination just after leading the United States through the Civil War to a story about the captain of a ship dying after leading his ship home, Whitman constructs a more universal narrative. It is no longer confined by time or situation; instead, it exemplifies the loss all might feel when losing a great leader. The best way to allow this poem to transcend its context is to write it in a metaphorical way.
The second reason for using the extended metaphor is that it allows the poet to write about a situation in a grand, romantic way. The image of the ship captain has historical and literary associations, so by using it, Whitman exaggerates the situation and thus strengthens its emotional impact on the reader.
Finally, the extended metaphor allows Whitman to express a personal sense of grief over a national loss. Whitman did not personally know Lincoln, so if the poem literally spoke of him, the personal interaction between the speaker and the captain would simply be viewed as contrived. By turning the story into metaphor, Whitman tells a personal narrative, allowing every reader to put themselves into the shoes of the speaker. In this sense, the speaker embodies the readers’ grief and allows them to feel closer to the dead president.
Elegy
An elegy is a poetic form that mourns a lost loved one. The elegy is usually reserved for events like funerals. It can be used to leverage the death of a loved one to rally people to a cause, but it is also used simply to mourn and remember the dead. A classic example of an elegy is "Pericles’s Funeral Oration". In that elegiac speech, Pericles uses the occasion to not only mourn the dead but to rally his city to defend itself and its values.
Whitman’s elegy is a mix between the rallying elegy and the mournful elegy, though it is much more of the latter. The poem tries to capture the grief of the nation, but is also an attempt to accept that grief and loss. In this sense, it serves two purposes: to mourn Lincoln’s death and to gain acceptance.
Rhyme and Rhythm
Whitman writes “O Captain!” almost entirely in iambs. An iamb is a metrical foot with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. While the rhythm breaks in some places, most of the poem follows that strict pattern. Below, the first stanza is scanned with stressed syllables in bold. Notice the repeating pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables.
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
The poem follows a set rhyme scheme: Each eight-line stanza has an aabbcded format. The eight lines are really two quatrains, or two four-line groups. In the first quatrain, the lines are long, with syllable counts between 12 and 15. The first quatrain in each stanza focuses mainly on the celebration and positive imagery that follows the completion of the war.
The second quatrain features shorter lines with syllable counts between five and eight. Though these are technically quatrains, it is easier to think of them as couplets that the writer has expanded into four lines. Consider the second stanza:
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
These quatrains center on the grief for the dead Captain, so it makes sense that the lines are shorter; they mimic the difficulty in speaking when one is grieving. The lack of a rhyme in the first and third lines suggests the quatrain could look like this:
Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck, you’ve fallen cold and dead.
Read like this, the quatrain keeps the rhyme scheme of the entire poem, turning it from aabbcded to aabbdd in each stanza. However, Whitman disrupts the rhyme and rhythm in these quatrains to add to the disoriented feeling associated with grief.
Related Titles
By Walt Whitman
