O Captain! My Captain!

Critical Appreciation

After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, Walt Whitman wrote two poems in the
memory of his ideal President, namely O Captain! My Captain! and When Lilacs in the
Dooryard Bloomed. The former uses the extended metaphor as a poetic form and it went on to
obtain cult status in American, so to say, English literature. Whitman’s identity came to be
defined by this singular creation of his, so much so that the poet himself grew impatient of it in
time. O Captain! My Captain! may also be considered to be an elegy. It comprises three double
quatrains with the rhyme scheme of aabbcded. The Greek elegy was written in couplets of
pentameter or hexameter, and Whitman remains true to that antique rhyme scheme in the first
half of his stanzas. The poem is loaded with a plethora of rhetorical figures, such as apostrophe
(O Captain! my Captain!), assonance (the port is near, the bells I hear), refrain (‘Fallen cold and
dead’) and hypallage (mournful tread).

The extended metaphor works on three levels, viz. Captain, ship and storm, which stand for
Abraham Lincoln, the United States and the American Civil War respectively. A ship returns
triumphant to the harbour and the eager countrymen have assembled on the shore to welcome
her. Unfortunately, the valiant captain of the ship has perished; he lies ‘cold and dead’ on the
deck of the ship, and is bemoaned by a younger sailor who looked up to him as captain, father
and idol. This younger sailor, in turn, stands for Whitman himself. The poem is charged with a
deep pathos, and the irony of fate: the captain, who has led the ship through storm and exigent at
sea, lies dead in the hour of his victory. All preparations for his felicitation are in vain, for he has
travelled on to a realm from where there is no return.

It is Whitman’s unparalleled reverence for Abraham Lincoln which vivifies the poem with a kind
of fierce pathos. When Lincoln visited New York en route to Washington in 1861, his striking
appearance and unpretentious dignity made a lasting first impression on Whitman. While living
in Washington from 1862-65, Whitman observed the President regularly, and came to trust his
‘supernatural tact’ and ‘idiomatic Western genius’. He admired the President’s plainness and his
‘homespun humour’. “No portrait”, he repeatedly said, “had ever captured Lincoln’s goodness,
tenderness, sadness and canny shrewdness”. He further said, “I love the President personally”.

As early as in 1856, Whitman had elucidated the attributes of his ideal President. This man
would be “a heroic, shrewd, fully-informed, healthy-bodied, middle aged, beard-faced American
blacksmith or boatman, emerging from the West”. Whitman believed that the true leader of
America would emerge from the West—that inclement environment which cultivates toughness
in individuals (and often corrupts, as in the short stories of O. Henry), but then again, the
seemingly ‘evil’ instincts in man are often stronger and more spontaneous compared to the
‘good’ instincts. Friedrich Nietzsche says in Thus Spake Zarathustra that we should send all our
evil to aid our good. For Whitman, Lincoln was the typical American hero. In his 1869 Lecture
on Abraham Lincoln, he observes that the previous stalwarts of American culture, such as
Washington and Franklin exhibited the European variety of excellence. Washington was
modelled on the Saxons, and Franklin belonged to the Age of the Stuarts, rooted in the
Elizabethan Era. But “Lincoln, underneath his practicality, was far less European, was quite
thoroughly western, original, essentially non-conventional and had a certain sort of outdoor or
prairie stamp”.

In the last stanza of O Captain! My Captain! , Whitman tries to establish a cult surrounding
Lincoln, that archetypal American hero.

Exult O shores! And ring O bells!

But I with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies

Fallen cold and dead.

The poet encourages the common people to celebrate the return of their captain, but personally,
finds no reason to be happy. He will rather walk on the deck alone, his heart burdened with
grief—a solitary and pensive figure who is inconsolable in his bereavement. In this way, the poet
sets himself at a cut above the public: they appear inane and insensitive in their exultation. They
do not seem to understand the gravity of the situation; they will simply reap the benefits of the
noble sacrifice of the dead hero. But the poet will sing praises of this noble man, just as the
Greek poets celebrated the achievements of their athletes and warriors in verse. In the elegiac
tradition, it was customary to mourn the dead with the hope that when the poet died, someone
sang his praises in turn, thus immortalising him. Perhaps the best example may be found
Milton’s Lycidas:

He must not float upon his wat’ry bier

Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,

Without the meed of some melodious tear…

So may some gentle muse

With lucky words favour my destin’d urn,

And as he passes turn

And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud!

Commemorating the hero in verse thus serves two purposes, to establish a hero cult, and to
ensure personal fame as a sentient artist. The reputation of the hero is tied to that of the poet. The
poet has shown himself to be superior to the masses. Therefore, he is the most deserving person
to establish the cult. Cults would operate on the selective dissemination of knowledge, and this
knowledge in turn, would belong to the worthy, the initiated. The poet is one of them. In ancient
Greece, hero cults would be centred around Herakles, Theseus, Achilles or Oedipus, who were
founders/savious of cities, unparalleled warriors or slayer of monsters. They would often be
deified, and given a place among the gods. Whitman wishes to offer a similar, exalted seat to
Lincoln, and immortalise him to posterity. In his Lecture he says:

…the grand deaths of the race—the dramatic deaths of every nationality—are its most important
inheritance value—in some respects beyond its art and literature…Is not here the point
underlying all tragedy? The famous pieces of Grecian masters...Why if the old Greeks had this
man—what epics—what would have been made out of him! How the rhapsodies would have
recited him! How quickly the quaint, tall form would have entered into the region where men
vitalize gods, and gods divinify men. But Lincoln, his times, his age, great as any age, belong
altogether to our own…Sometimes I think our American days, our own stage, is much more
fateful than any other thing in Aeschylus, more heroic than the fighters around Troy, models of
character acute and hardy as Ulysses, and deaths more pitiful than Priam’s.

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