“O Captain! My Captain!

” is an elegy written by Walt Whitman in 1865 to

commemorate the death of President Abraham Lincoln. It was first published
in Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865), a collection of Whitman’s poems inspired by
the events of the American Civil War. The poem is perhaps Whitman’s most
famous—which is ironic, since it is far more conventional in meter, form, and
subject than much of Whitman’s other work. Although some critics have
suggested that Whitman regretted ever writing “O Captain! My Captain!” it
undeniably captured the mood of a nation in mourning and has remained one
of Whitman’s best-loved and most-quoted poems.

​ “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

​
​ 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—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.”
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.

​
​ 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.

​ “O Captain! My Captain!” Symbols

​
​ 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.

​ Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “O Captain! My

Captain!”
​ 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 and Historical Context of “O Captain! My
Captain!”
​ 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.

POETIC DEVICES

"O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman is rich with various poetic devices that
contribute to its emotional impact and lyrical beauty. Let's explore some of the key
poetic devices used in the poem:

​ Metaphor: The entire poem is an extended metaphor, with the ship symbolizing
the United States and the captain representing Abraham Lincoln. This metaphor
adds depth and complexity to the poem's meaning, as it suggests that Lincoln
was not just a political leader but also a guiding force for the nation.
​ Apostrophe: The poem is an apostrophe, a figure of speech in which the speaker
addresses a person or thing that is absent or unable to respond. In this case, the
speaker addresses Lincoln directly, lamenting his death and expressing
admiration for his leadership.
​ Imagery: Whitman employs vivid imagery throughout the poem to evoke the
sights and sounds of mourning. For example, phrases like "The ship has
weather'd every rack" and "Exult O shores, and ring O bells!" paint a vivid picture
of the nation's response to Lincoln's death.
​ Repetition: The repetition of the phrase "O Captain! My Captain!" throughout the
poem serves to emphasize the speaker's grief and longing for Lincoln. The
repetition also adds to the poem's musicality and emotional resonance.
​ Alliteration: Whitman uses alliteration, or the repetition of consonant sounds, to
create rhythm and emphasis in the poem. For example, in the line "But O heart!
heart! heart!" the repetition of the "h" sound emphasizes the speaker's anguish.
​ Meter: The poem is written in trochaic meter, characterized by stressed syllables
followed by unstressed syllables. This rhythmic pattern adds to the poem's
musicality and contributes to its emotional impact.
​ Symbolism: Beyond the metaphorical use of the ship and captain, there is
additional symbolism in the poem. For instance, the "victor ship" symbolizes the
 Union's victory in the Civil War, while the "anchor'd safe and sound" represents the
nation's stability and unity.
​ Personification: Whitman personifies the ship and the shores, giving them
human-like qualities and emotions. This personification adds depth to the poem
and underscores the speaker's emotional connection to the events described.

Overall, "O Captain! My Captain!" is a masterful example of how poetic devices can be
used to convey complex emotions and ideas with power and resonance. Through
metaphor, imagery, repetition, and other techniques, Whitman creates a poignant elegy
that captures the collective grief and reverence felt by a nation in mourning.