Lincoln did not disappoint his poet admirer and gained stature as Lincoln’s presidency progressed and as the North won the Civil War, preserving the Union.
He asserts that Whitman looked for a “Redeemer President of These States,” who would come out of the real West, the log hut, the clearing, the woods, the prairie, the hillside.” This “Redeemer President” appeared six years later in the form of Abraham Lincoln. David Reynolds of History Now - American History Online discusses the relationship between the master poet and the fearless leader. 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’.Abraham Lincoln was a man Walt Whitman deeply admired and is the captain to whom Whitman refers. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
