A Close Reading of “Oh Captain! My Captain

A Close Reading of “Oh Captain! My Captain!E

Walt Whitman’s poem, “Oh Captain! My Captain!Eis easily taken at face value. There are young sailors coming back from a long, hard journey, to find a pier full of excited bystanders to greet their return. The narrator goes on to tell the captain the good news and finds him dead, and not able to celebrate with the rest of the population. There is an extensive metaphor between the captain of the ship and Abraham Lincoln. With the knowledge of what was happening in history at that time and re-reading the poem, a completely different story is told. The first few lines of the poem introduce this metaphor, alluding to the Civil War period, which the rest of the poem expands on. This metaphor between Lincoln and the captain is conveying Whitman’s grief towards recent events.
The diction in this poem consists of repetitive phrases along with powerful and moving words, which are sad in nature. “But O heart! heart!...