O Captain My Captain! English Literature Class 8

O Captain! My Captain!

 Themes and Figures of Speech

Visit my youtube channel for study materials and animated video lessons on various ICSE & ISC subjects.Click here👇

https://youtube.com/channel/UCEEd8EHCRzlVUQnNFdATQmw

Themes of Oh captain! My captain!

1. Victory and Loss

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.

2. 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.

Poetic devices - O Captain! My Captain!

1. Metaphor: There are three extended metaphors in the poem.The first extended metaphor is “Captain,” used in the first line that runs throughout the poem. Here Captain represents

Abraham Lincoln who loses his life in the battle. The second metaphor is “Voyage,” which presents the Civil War. The

journey of the voyage is full of tests and trials, but now the ship is nearing the port represents the timeline of the Civil

War. The third metaphor, “ship” represents the United States that has undergone the Civil War.

2. Personification: Whitman has used personification to give

human qualities to lifeless objects. He has personified the

walk of the speaker as a “mournful tread” because he cannot

live without his captain. He has also personified shores in the line, “Exult, O Shores!” As if the shores are

humans and they are going to blow trumpets of victory.

3. Imagery: Imagery appeals to the five senses of the readers. The poet has used visual imagery such as, “cold and dead”, “Lips are pale and still”, bleeding drops of red” and “mournful tread.” Whitman’s choice of powerful words has made the

reader visualize the death of the captain.

4. Apostrophe: An apostrophe is a device used to call somebody or something from afar. Here the poet has used an

apostrophe to call his dead captain. The phrase, “O Captain! My Captain!” expresses love and attachment of the speaker with his captain.

5. Alliteration: Alliteration is the repetition of the same

consonant sounds in the same lines of the poetry such as the

use of /f/ in “flag is flung” and the sound of /s/ in “safe and

sound.”