It was supposed to be a time of celebration. A nice April breeze was blowing through the states. The Civil War had just ended after General Lee surrendered at the Appomattox courthouse in Virginia. The North had won, and slavery was on course to being abolished.
And then the shot rang out. Abraham Lincoln was dead. It was just six short days after the end of the war. A nation grieved, and Walt Whitman grieved with them. 'O Captain! My Captain!' became Whitman's elegy for Abraham Lincoln. An elegy is a poem that mourns the dead.
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In his elegy, Whitman uses the extended metaphor, or the consistent use of a figurative idea to portray a literary reality throughout a work of art, of Lincoln as a ship's captain to portray Lincoln as the nation's leader.
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.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up - for you the flag is flung - for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths - for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
As the poem describes a ship just arriving in the harbor to a grand celebration, the nation is literally just ending a war and is ready to celebrate. In the poem, the captain of the ship sees the 'shores a-crowding' and the 'eager faces turning' as the ship sails in. While in reality, the nation is looking to their president with admiration and excitement and in need of leadership for what will happen next.
But the captain lays upon the ship's deck 'fallen cold and dead.' He will not waken. In the real world, the president is gone, and just as the poem's narrator, an assumed crewman, 'walks with mournful tread,' Whitman walks with mournful tread in the new reality of his beloved nation.
In his grief Whitman has created a dirge, or a song for the dead. This is because Whitman considers his poems as songs and creates them in that manner using meter, form, and here, extended metaphor.
In 'O Captain! My Captain!' we see Whitman using iambic pentameter. This is a rhythm which stresses every other syllable so that you hear a ta tum ta tum ta tum beat as you read or speak the lines. You can clearly hear it in lines such as 'while follow eyes the steady keel' or 'My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will.'
Occasionally Whitman does fall out of the iambic pentameter rhythm. This could signify that while he is grieving he cannot maintain a steady rhythm, just as someone weeping would not cry in a steady rhythm. There are outbursts that change the rhythm.
The biggest example of this is in the title phrase itself, where the stressed rhythm falls as follows with 'O Captain! my Captain!' The rhythm itself breaks with two unstressed syllables between the end of 'captain' and the word 'my.' The break of rhythm here signifies Whitman crying out with grief that is more important than meter.
Beyond the rhythmic iambic pentameter, Whitman finds other ways to truly make this poem a dirge. Just as songs have verses and a chorus, Whitman also builds his poem in three stanzas, with each having a verse and chorus.
The verse is the first four lines of each stanza with two couplets per verse. A couplet contains two lines of meter that rhyme. For example, the first verse rhymes the end of line one with the end of line two: 'O Captain! my Captain! Our fearful trip is done; /Our ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won.'
The chorus is the last four lines of each stanza. If you look closely, the chorus is basically one set of couplets split up in a way to create four lines. The second and fourth line of each chorus rhymes as the end of a couplet would have. For example, in the chorus of the first stanza 'red' rhymes with 'dead.'
'O Captain! My Captain' is written by Walt Whitman as an elegy for Abraham Lincoln. He uses an extended metaphor to equate the captain in his poem to Lincoln. The long journey's end is the end of the civil war. He uses iambic pentameter, rhyming couplets, and stanzas complete with chorus and verse to create a song-like atmosphere known as a dirge.
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