![]() ![]() ![]() In line four, the speaker calls the voyage victorious and that the objective was won, which signifies again President Lincoln’s victory of the end of the Civil War. He refers to his Captain again as “My father” to signify this close relationship. In the final stanza, the sailor finally accepts that his Captain will never revive. Whitman again uses anaphora, “You’ve fallen cold and dead”, to signify the realization that his Captain is still not responding. This signifies the close relationship that the sailor felt with his Captain which is a metaphor for the close relationship that Whitman felt to President Lincoln. ![]() In the second quatrain of this stanza, the sailor takes President Lincoln in his arms and calls him “father”. This journey is perhaps a metaphor for the Civil War which President Lincoln led to a victory for the Union. He also uses caesura hyphen breaks and the phrases: “rise up and hear the bells / Rise up-for you the flag is flung-for you the bugle trills,…” to signify the sailor trying to call him to come back to life and witness the tributes by his crewmates as well as the crowds on the shore who are welcoming him home from the long journey. In the second stanza, Whitman uses anaphora as the sailor repeats his address “O Captain! my Captain” in trying to revive him from the dead. In line eight, the last line of the first stanza, the sailor realizes that his Captain has “Fallen cold and dead”. There is also foreshadowing in this stanza as the people on the shore, unaware of the Captain’s death, are “all exulting” while the “steady keel, the vessel grim and daring” heads towards the shore. For example, in line five, Whitman uses the first indented line with anaphora, “But O heart! heart! heart!” ,to signify Lincoln’s heart beat is ceasing. The following lines of the octet are unrhymed and indented in succession in the second quatrain as a visual impression in typography to signify a falling mood as Lincoln lies dying. The only rhyming couplets begin each stanza, “done…won/ still…will/” and a near rhyme “bells…trills”. Whitman uses the format of three octet stanzas made up of two distinct quatrains. He continues to mix the meters throughout the poem, putting iambic meters at the ends of most lines which is typically used by poets to keep the mood light and upbeat however, Whitman uses the iambic meters in this elegy to keep the action moving forward: “our fearful trip is done/…the vessel grim and daring/…rise up and hear the bells” etc. ![]() Whitman begins this poem with the dactylic anaphora, “O Captain! my Captain!”, followed by iambic meter, to combine in tetrameter, which signifies a serious, heavy tone. The horrific, untimely death of the President inspired Whitman to expresses his own feelings towards the death of President Lincoln and wrote this as a metaphor of a sailor speaking to his captain as they have just ended an arduous voyage. Whitman, a great admirer of President Lincoln, lived in Washington during the time of the Civil War and often saw him riding horseback around town. In “O Captain! My Captain”, Whitman is writing an elegy to the recently assassinated President Lincoln. ![]()
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