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Word Gems
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Walt Whitman
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“O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman
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.
from https://www.litcharts.com
“O Captain! My Captain!” Summary
Oh Captain, my Captain! Our hard journey is over. The ship has survived every storm, and we’ve won the prize we've been fighting for. The port is close by and I hear bells ringing and people celebrating. All their eyes are on the steady ship, that bold and brave vessel. But oh, my heart! heart! heart! Oh, look at the drops of blood on the deck where my captain is lying cold and dead.
Oh Captain, my Captain! Get up and listen to the bells. Get up—they're waving the flag for you—they’re playing the bugle for you. They’ve brought bouquets and wreaths with ribbons for you—all these people are crowding on the shore for you. The swaying crowd is calling for you, and all the people's eager faces turning towards you. Here Captain! My dear father! I'll put my arm under your head. I must be dreaming that on the deck, you're lying cold and dead.
My Captain isn’t answering me. His lips are pale and unmoving. My father doesn’t feel my arm beneath his head, since he has no pulse or consciousness. The ship has anchored safely, and its journey is over. After this hard journey, the victorious ship has returned with its prize. Let the crowds celebrate and the bells ring! Meanwhile I, slowly and sadly, walk across the deck where my Captain is lying cold and dead.
“O Captain! My Captain!” Themes
Even as the poem “O Captain! My Captain!” celebrates the end of the American Civil War, it is also an elegy for President Abraham Lincoln. Victory and loss are thus closely intertwined throughout the poem. On the one hand, its mourning is tempered with joyful reminders that the war is won. Its celebrations, on the other hand, are haunted by melancholy. In this sense, Whitman’s poem illuminates the lingering pain and trauma of losses sustained in war—as well as the impossibility of ever separating the triumph of victory from its human costs.
In its juxtaposition of the language of loss and victory, “O Captain! My Captain!” uses poetic form to model the close relationship between triumph and pain. At first, it seems as if this will be a poem celebrating the victory of the Union in the Civil War. The speaker congratulates President Lincoln on steering the metaphorical ship of state through “every wrack,” i.e. storm, and declares that “the prize we sought is won.” However, halfway through this triumphant first stanza, the speaker breaks off: “But O heart! heart! heart! ... my Captain lies, / Fallen cold and dead.” The sudden appearance of a qualification—"But O heart!”—reveals to the reader that not all is well. The poem scarcely has time to celebrate triumph before facing loss.
One of the poem’s painful ironies is that its celebrations are intended to honor the leader who won this victory, yet President Lincoln is not there to witness the triumph. This is made all the starker by the joyous scenes that begin each stanza: there are ringing bells, “bouquets,” “wreaths,” and cheering crowds. The poem juxtaposes these moments of vibrancy and happiness with the body of the “Captain”, which is “cold,” “dead,” “pale,” and “still.”
The speaker also emphasizes that all of these celebrations are for President Lincoln with the repetition of the word “you”—“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 poet repeats five times. The repetition of the word further underscores the poignancy of Lincoln’s absence from his own celebration.
Even small formal features like the poem’s punctuation register the tension between celebration and mourning, as the speaker’s emotions descend from joy to grief. For example, the exclamation points after “O Captain!” in the first stanza seem like enthusiastic celebrations of victory. Later in the poem, however, the meaning of the exclamation points begins to subtly change. “O heart!” becomes an exclamation of grief and dismay. The exclamation points after “O Captain!” in the second stanza take on even darker connotations, since it’s now clear that the speaker is addressing a dead man rather than a living leader. The five total exclamation points in this stanza take on a desperate quality, as if the speaker is begging the fallen leader to come back to life again. By the final stanza, there is only a single exclamation point, marking the poem’s newly restrained tone of quiet grief. The speaker acknowledges that the world around him is celebrating—"Exult O shores, and ring O bells!”—but he walks with “mournful tread,” grieving even as the country rejoices.
Throughout, the speaker dramatizes the painfully close relationship between loss and victory. The celebration of the Union’s triumph is reframed by the reminder that the country has paid a dear price. Whitman seems to argue that loss and victory are closely linked in all wartime settings, where victory always requires the expenditure of human life.
Grief and Isolation
Each stanza of “O Captain! My Captain!” pivots between public celebration and private grief. In this way, the poem foregrounds the tension between outward emotional expression and internal emotional experience. The speaker must reconcile his personal grief for President Lincoln, whom he seems to regard as a paternal figure, with the wider grief—and joy—of the nation. Through these tensions, Whitman suggests that deep grief for a loved one can be an isolating force that makes loss even more painful than it might otherwise be.
The tension between collective experience and private emotion is implied even in the title of the poem, “O Captain! My Captain!” The speaker compares President Lincoln to the captain of a ship and then refers to him as my captain, emphasizing his own personal connection to the president. The poem is not titled “Our Captain”; rather, the speaker seems to feel that President Lincoln is his captain in particular. Logically, the captain of a ship is indeed everyone’s captain, but the poet’s choice to emphasize the personal pronoun makes the loss seem private and personal rather than public.
The public celebrations that accompany the return of the ship into the harbor—metaphorically standing in for the victory of the Union in the Civil War—are a shared experience of joy. By contrast, the speaker’s experience of grief is private and solitary. The descriptions of the crowds give the impression of a shared public experience. The “people” are “all exulting”; they are “a-crowding” and form a “swaying mass” on the shore. They seem to have become a kind of collective, feeling together and expressing themselves as one body.
On the other hand, the depiction of the speaker himself emphasizes his isolation and solitary melancholy. Although he “hear[s] … the bells,” he ignores them and walks alone, “with mournful tread.” The poem presents an experience of collective rejoicing, but the speaker chooses to physically and emotionally separate himself from the crowd. The isolated nature of the speaker’s grief seems to result from his perception of his relationship with Lincoln. That is, his mourning seems to transcend the sorrow of a citizen for the assassination of a leader to become more like that of a son for his father. Indeed, the speaker repeatedly refers to President Lincoln as “father.”
The poem’s final stanza thus introduces another layer of emotional complexity, as the speaker’s grief becomes yet more private and personal in contrast to the rejoicing of the crowds. The speaker admits that “[m]y father does not feel my arm” and “he has no pulse,” implying that the speaker has physically touched and shaken the body to feel for a pulse. This gesture is highly private and intimate, more like a familial relationship than that of a citizen and a leader. It’s clear that the speaker feels so strongly about the fallen leader that he experiences a close, almost paternal relationship with him. The fact that the speaker’s intense, private grief contrasts so sharply with the cheering crowds suggests that losing a loved one can create a painful boundary between an individual and other people.
The Individual vs. the Nation
“O Captain! O Captain!” depicts the overwhelming grief and trauma that followed one of the most notorious political assassinations in United States history. At the same time, it suggests that the nation will move on and even thrive after the loss of its leader. In doing so, the poem interrogates the relationship between the individual and the wider political community, ultimately suggesting that the United States as a nation is a political project that can and must transcend the life of any single person—even though individuals are still very important.
The poem’s extended metaphor compares President Lincoln to a captain steering the “ship of state”— guiding the Union through the Civil War. However, the “captain” of the title turns out to be less essential to the continuing success and unity of the nation than it might initially seem. At first it seems like the “captain,” President Lincoln, is solely responsible for the safe return of the ship after it has “weather’d every rack,” that is, survived every storm and finally made it home. But the poem also hints that this is not entirely the case: even in the first stanza, the speaker refers to the voyage as “our fearful trip,” implying that the community has survived these trials by banding together and assuming shared responsibility.
The idea that President Lincoln might not be entirely essential to the nation’s victory becomes clearer when the citizens continue to rejoice after their captain has fallen. Even while the “Captain lies / Fallen cold and dead,” the people celebrate victory with bugles, bells, and public commemorations. Their grief at the assassination of the president does not stop them from continuing their celebrations and moving on with life. Although the speaker claims that the celebrations are “for you [i.e. President Lincoln],” this starts to look more like wishful thinking as the poem continues. The people don’t seem to require the physical presence of President Lincoln in order to celebrate; the commemoration of the Union’s victory takes on a life of its own, persisting as a community celebration even without the presence of a leader to direct it.
However, this emphasis on communal strength is complicated by the speaker’s own ambivalent relationship to the crowds that await the ship’s arrival. He seems to feel that he has little in common with them, since his grief alienates him from the general mood of celebration. This contrast shows how meaningful individuals (like the fallen “Captain”) are within collective efforts, even if those efforts can still succeed without them. Each stanza of the poem is split between the first four lines, which generally depict communal scenes of rejoicing, and the final four lines, which typically feature expressions of the speaker’s personal grief. This consistent divide suggests that the speaker still feels a great deal of individual pain at the loss of his leader, despite the joy of his broader community. The speaker even chooses to remain on board the ship while the communal celebrations go on. The bells ring and the “shores … exult,” but he chooses to “walk the deck my Captain lies,” alone. This physical separation reinforces the significance of the loss of the captain.
While the nation manages to move forward without President Lincoln, the speaker can’t quite join in the celebrations—the loss of his leader is still agonizing, even though the nation has survived. Ultimately, the poem seems to argue that collectivity is necessary for the survival of the United States, but it also acknowledges that individual people play crucial roles within this collective effort.
Lines 1-4
The opening lines of the poem depict scenes of rejoicing following a ship's victorious return to harbor. The speaker addresses the captain as he congratulates him on navigating the ship through a "fearful" (i.e. frightening) journey filled with "racks," or storms. After all these dangers, the ship has returned home, having won the "prize" of victory. The port celebrates by greeting the victorious ship with cheers and bells. The ship is described as "steady" but also battle-hardened, "grim," and "daring," thus emphasizing its bravery and longevity in the face of long dangers.
These opening lines have a measured rhythm that mirrors the speaker's celebratory tone. The lines are made up of two rhyming couplets, so the rhyme scheme follows a regular pattern of AABB.
The meter of the lines, too, follows a regular iambic pattern, like this:
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
This rhythmical regularity emphasizes the ceremonial, almost stately quality of this scene. It seems as if everyone is sharing in the collective celebrations. And indeed, the poem is an extended metaphor for the Union's joy when the American Civil War ended in 1865. After four years of vicious fighting that cost many American lives, the Union—which the poet compares to a ship—finally declared victory against the Confederacy. In the poem, this triumph is compared to a ship coming home to harbor. These lines suggest that everyone in the Union rejoiced with equal fervor at the end of a long and painful journey.
The fact that the poem opens with a repeated apostrophe—which, from context, readers will know is addressed to Abraham Lincoln—also immediately establishes the president as responsible for this great victory.
Symbol The Ship
The Ship
The extended metaphor in “O Captain! My Captain!” compares President Lincoln to the captain of a ship—a ship that then becomes a symbol for the United States itself. The speaker asserts that the ship has undergone many trials over the course of its journey, including storms, fighting, and other dangers. This description of a perilous journey is intended to represent the divisive and bloody struggle between the Union and the Confederacy during the American Civil War. The speaker attributes the ship’s safe return to the harbor to the bravery and leadership of the captain, just as many attributed the Union’s victory to the statesmanship of President Lincoln.
Tragically, however, the speaker reveals that the captain lies dead on the deck of the ship while the city rejoices—a metaphor for recent events, since President Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 and was unable to celebrate his victory. In this sense, the ship is a symbol of national unity and perseverance that nonetheless becomes a site of loss and tragedy in the poem.
Extended Metaphor
The entire poem—from the title onwards—relies on an extended metaphor that compares President Lincoln to a captain and the United States to a ship. In this metaphor, the poet describes how the ship has endured many “racks” (i.e. storms), “fearful” journeys, and dangers—metaphorically standing in for the destructive battles of the American Civil War—before finally coming home to harbor having won what the speaker calls its “prize” or “object.” This prize is a metaphor for the Union’s victory in the war, which had finally come about, after a long struggle, in 1865. The speaker describes how the “ship is anchor’d safe and sound,” just as the Union emerged triumphant after years of struggle against the Confederacy.
But although the ship’s voyage comes to an end, this is not the conclusion of the extended metaphor. What looks like a triumphant nautical metaphor for President Lincoln’s able leadership and the Union’s victory soon turns tragic, as it turns out that the “captain” of the poem’s governing metaphor has in fact died, even as the city celebrates the victorious ship. In this way, the poet takes a conventional extended metaphor—comparing a political leader to a captain of a ship—and recasts it in a more melancholy and reflective tone.
Fearful Rack Exult Keel Bugle Object
The word “fearful” appears twice in the poem, used both times in the phrase “fearful trip.” This implies that the journey undertaken by the ship has been “fearful” in the sense of “inspiring fear.” However, despite the frightening challenges faced by the ship, it has nonetheless returned victorious
Form
“O Captain! My Captain!” is a ballad written in three eight-line stanzas, or octaves. However, it might be more accurate to assert that each stanza contains two formally distinct quatrains, or groups of four lines. This is because the first four lines and the last four lines of each stanza look very different in formal terms.
In each stanza, the first four lines are longer, written in an iambic meter, and follow an AABB rhyme scheme. By contrast, the succeeding four lines are shorter, tend to deviate from the iambic meter of the preceding lines, and follow a CDED rhyme scheme.
This formal difference is no accident, since it mirrors the thematic and emotional shifts implicit in the transition from one quatrain to another. Each stanza begins with vivid descriptions of scenes of communal rejoicing as the crowds celebrate the safe return of the ship to harbor. However, the stanza then redirects attention to the speaker’s grief at the loss of his “captain,” President Lincoln, who has died in his moment of triumph. In this way, the formal transformation undergone by each stanza mirrors the juxtaposition between victory and loss that is central to the poem’s emotional landscape.
Meter
"O Captain! My Captain!" is written in iambic meter (unstressed-stressed). However, this is a general rather than a strict rule, since many lines are irregular. The poem's first line, for instance, follows this stressed/unstressed pattern for the most part yet has a trochee (stressed-unstressed) in its third foot:
O Cap- | tain! my | Captain! | our fear- | ful trip | is done,
Depending on how you read the line, you could also scan this as two amphibrachs, a very rare metrical foot that follows an unstressed-stressed-unstressed pattern (da-DUM-da):
O Captain! | my Captain!
Either way, the emphasis on the start of the word "Captain" seems appropriate given the importance of this figure in the poem. Even so the first four lines of the first stanza follow a mostly regular iambic meter. In the fifth line, however, there doesn't seem to be any discernible meter whatsoever. Instead, all that's clear is the repeated stress on the word "heart," a moment of epizeuxis and emphasis that mimics the beating of a heart itself:
But O heart! heart! heart!
Also note the trochees and spondees (stressed-stressed) that interrupt the iambic meter of lines 9 and 10:
O Cap- | tain! my | Captain! | rise up |and hear |the bells;
Rise up | —for you | the flag | is flung |—for you | the bugle trills,
The repeated spondees of "rise up" add emphasis to the phrase, suggesting just how desperately the speaker wants the Captain to live, to be able to take in the great victory all around him. In this sense, although the speaker generally uses a regular iambic meter, the poem sometimes breaks out of meter entirely in moments like these of particular drama or exclamation, as when the speaker experiences a powerful swelling of emotion.
Rhyme Scheme
The poem is written with regular end rhymes. Some of these are slant rhymes ("bells" and "trills," for example) while others are perfect rhymes ("done" and "won"). However, the rhyme shifts halfway through each "octave," or stanza of eight lines. This is because the first four lines of each stanza are made up of rhyming couplets, but the last four lines are not. So in each stanza, the first four lines follow this rhyme scheme:
AABB
The second quatrain, however, has a different, more varied rhyme scheme:
CDED
The shift in the rhyme scheme between the first and second half of each stanza might be said to mirror the poem's shift in focus from the celebrations of cheering crowds to the speaker's melancholy and grief. The occasional internal rhymes in the initial quatrains ("near" and "hear" in line 3, "trip and "ship" in line 20) add to that sense of joy and celebration. The less regular rhyme scheme of the second quatrains, meanwhile, gives the poem a less polished and more chaotic energy, suggestive of the powerful emotions articulated by the speaker.
It's also worth noting that the poem maintains some patterns of rhyme between stanzas, but does not do so for all the rhymes. In particular, all of the D rhymes in each stanza are words that end in an "ed" sound — they all rhyme together across the three stanzas. That is not true for any of the other rhymes. The D rhymes all share this trait because every stanza ends on the word "dead," and so this insistent rhyming with "dead" in each stanza serves to drive home the tragedy of Lincoln's death.
“O Captain! My Captain!” Speaker
The speaker of "O Captain! My Captain!" seems to be an ordinary crew member of the ship described in the poem—a ship that stands in, metaphorically, for the United States—since he describes President Lincoln as "my captain." Though the speaker is not gendered in the poem, it's likely that he is a man given that, at the time of the poem's writing, a ship's crew would be made up only of men. Of course, poems are not always beholden to their context, and it is entirely possible to interpret the speaker's gender otherwise!
In any case, at first this speaker appears as a kind of spokesperson for the crowds who cheer the return of the ship, noting that "our fearful trip is done" and "the prize we sought is won." Soon, however, the poem opens up a gap between the speaker and the celebrations around him. While the people are "exulting" or celebrating, the speaker fixates on the drops of blood on the deck of the ship and expresses his grief that the captain has "fallen cold and dead" even at the height of his triumph.
The speaker's sense of emotional isolation deepens throughout the poem. While the crowds present bouquets and victory wreaths, the speaker desperately tries to revive his fallen captain by lifting his head and shaking him awake. There seems to be no way for the speaker to share the rejoicing of those around him. In the poem's final lines, as the crowd cheers and the bells ring, the speaker remains on the ship by his captain's dead body, mourning the loss of his leader.
“O Captain! My Captain!” Setting
The poem is set in a port at which a ship has just returned from a long and perilous sea journey. Although the time and place are not specified, the poem is an extended metaphor that likens the “captain” of the title to President Abraham Lincoln, the ship to the United States, and the port to the victory of the Union in the American Civil War. In this sense, it might be said that the poem is really set in the northeast United States in the 1860s, around the time it was written.
Literary Context
Walt Whitman is one of the most significant figures in the history of American poetry. His critical reputation is mostly the legacy of his collection Leaves of Grass (1855), which he revised many times throughout his life. His poems often experiment with form—they rarely rhyme or follow convention meter schemes—and explore themes of sexuality and erotic experience, which in fact led Whitman’s employer at the civil service to accuse him of obscenity. In this sense, Whitman broke with many of the traditions of American poetry that came before him. For instance, the earlier work of the “Fireside Poets,” such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Cullen Bryant, emphasized metrical regularity and pastoral or nationalist themes, such as odes to the American countryside.
“O Captain! My Captain!” has been the site of heated critical controversy because it doesn’t fit into an idea of Whitman’s poetry derived from Leaves of Grass. In some ways it is more like the conventional poetry of the Fireside Poets, since it is metrically regular, short, and patriotic. As a result, modern critics have often argued that the poem is aesthetically inferior to Whitman’s later, more experimental poetry, citing Whitman’s own statement later in life that he wished he had never written it.
At the same time, however, proponents of the poem have suggested that the poem’s accessible and regular language and meter offers a vehicle through which to express powerful emotions in a controlled form. The poem was enormously popular when it was first published and is still regularly memorized and recited, suggesting that it offered a way for the American people to express their collective grief.
Historical Context
“O Captain! My Captain!” was written in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War (1861-1865), the four-year conflict between the Northern and Southern states. After decades of tensions over the issues of slavery and states’ rights, eleven Southern states declared independence from the Union in the early 1860s. The war exacted an enormous death toll, and Civil War battles remain some of the bloodiest days in American history, in terms of the cost to American lives. Finally, at the end of a long and grinding struggle that left the Union victorious, President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate partisan, in 1865.
The poem offers an extended metaphor for the political situation in 1865. The “captain” is President Lincoln, the ship stands in for the United States, and the port to which the ship is returning represents the Union’s victory in the Civil War. Just as President Lincoln was assassinated at the war’s end, the caption of the poem’s title falls “cold and dead” in the moment of his triumph.
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