O Captain! My Captain! is a metaphor poem written in 1865 by Walt Whitman, about the death of American president Abraham Lincoln.
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,įrom fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, Rise up-for you the flag is flung-for you the bugle trills,įor you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths-for you the shores a-crowding,įor you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, Here in the poem, Whitman has made a stark contrast between the cheerfulness and mourning in the last stanza when the speaker says ‘ exult O shores’ ‘ but I with mournful tread’.O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, Juxtaposition is a literary device to create a sharp contrast between two things side by side for the reader to compare. Images like ‘ the bleeding drops of red’, ‘ lips are pale and still’, ‘ fallen cold and dead’ are some examples of Whitman creating visual imagery which directly strikes the reader’s mind. Such kind of repetition of consonant sounds is called Consonance.Īssonance: You would also observe the repetition of the vowel sound in the /i/ in the words ‘trip’ and ‘ship’ in the first and second lines. Repetition of consonant sounds /f/ in the phrase ‘flag is flung’ and /s/ in the phrase ‘safe and sound’.Ĭonsonance: You will also observe the repetition of /g/ sound in the above-mentioned phrase. Similarly, the ‘ prize’ is the preservation of the Union. The ‘ fearful trip’ refers to the Civil war fought between the Northern and the Southern States of America from 1861 to 1865. The poem reflects the following extended metaphors – The ‘ Ship’ is the United States, the ‘ Captain’ is Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States. The author takes a single metaphor and applies it at length using different images, ideas, thoughts and subjects.
O captin my catain series#
The extended metaphor refers to a metaphor that has been used by the author in a series of sentences of prose, or lines in the poems. In the second stanza, the situation has changed and the Captain is now ‘unconscious’.įurther, in the phrase ‘ Exult O shores’, ‘ring O bells!’ the speaker addresses inanimate things/objects. In the first stanza, you would have observed the phrase ‘ O Captain! My Captain!’ is a call by the speaker to the Captain of the ship who is on the deck, probably out of sight of the speaker or far away from him. The apostrophe is a literary device that refers to a call by an individual to someone who is dead or not present there or an inanimate object. At a moment when the entire nation has united, and peace is restored, the speaker mourns the loss of a father figure of the United States. The speaker in the poem is devastated by his death and highlights the victorious journey past torturous and atrocious circumstances.
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