O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN!:
SO WHAT?
This is the poem that Walt Whitman would have written if he wrote for The Twilight Zone.
If your point of reference is television, as it is for most people, and you like a good spooky scare, then "O Captain! My Captain!" can be read like a good ghost story. In the middle of the victory celebration, among the ribbon and wreaths, the winning ship glides into its dock, but someone looks over to notice—ye gads!—the Captain is lying on the dock. Not drunk on grog, as most of the sailors lying around the deck presumably are, but bloody and rigor mortisy.
Seeing this, the speaker of the poem goes into a panic, rattling off fast-paced, mesmerizing lines rich with the sexy gothicness of a snazzy rhythm, a swaying industrial house beat, and terror-stricken exclamation points.
Eeek. People who would rather watch tv than read poetry (everyone) generally like this poem because they can at least figure out what’s going on in it; therefore, it always ends up being taught in almost every high-school poetry class. It’s also a standard in books that have titles like Best Loved Poetry, because, as your pharmacist can tell you, “best loved” is really the best way to judge the effectiveness of practically anything.
But if normal people like it then poets and people who dabble in the dark poetic arts—the turtleneck and beret crowd—are naturally going to find it too loud and crass. Poets generally don’t care for this sort of shrieking tomfoolery at all because they are sensitive, and something so obvious hits them as harshly as headlights in the little dilated eyes of a nocturnal animal, say a bush rat. Walt Whitman himself was pretty embarrassed by “O Captain! My Captain!” and, though it was one of his most popular works ever, he ended up sorry he wrote it—he would rather be remembered for poems like “A Child Said, What is the Grass?” because they examine the truly important issues of the times, such as pediatric stupidity.
But if you can set aside the prejudice that a poem must be sublime, and look at from the larger artistic standard of form fitting message, this poem is strong and even a little fun. It’s the kind of fun that we accept from Edgar Alan Poe: the speaker is yelling out insanity with the rhythm that pounds within his psychotic skull. It’s all told as a hallucination, as the poem itself even mentions (“It is some dream...”), like those movies where the crazy monster guy comes to kill the kids once they fall asleep, or like those other movies in which the other crazy monster guy kills the kids once they loosen up and start dropping their pants in the boathouse . Long before the movies were invented, Whitman created this faceless monster – you can call it Death or Defeat or whatever – that comes back and mows down the Captain just when everyone thinks they’re in the clear. Spooky, huh?
Ask any English teacher, though, and they’ll tell you that’s not what this poem is about at all.
If you just happen to be thumbing through a poetry book—at the naprapath’s office, let’s say—there will be a footnote, or a little paragraph in italics at the top of the page, to tell you that “O Captain! My Captain!” isn’t what you think it is. If you read it in a class, the teacher will puff up his or her chest, suck in a big breath, and make the announcement as if being the first person to break the news that herpes has been abolished: Whitman wrote it, each source will tell you, to cope with his feeling of loss over the death of President Lincoln.
The ship’s the Civil War, see? and Lincoln is the captain who steered through to victory and then was killed while everyone was celebrating, and Ulysses S. Grant is Ol’ One-Eye Pete, the drunken swabbie (not portrayed here) who broke into the rum before the celebration began, and the crow’s nest is, I don’t know, let’s call it a stovepipe hat.
Well, this certainly distorts things, but not in any nice way. Have you ever seen Walt Whitman? Scrawny old fellow, foot-long beard, sunken eyes – he looked like late Howard Hughes, or like the old hippie who runs the shop in your town that combines a noun with the word “-smith” in the title (Candlesmith, Tunesmith, Donutsmith, etc.).
Now, imagine that guy in a sailor outfit, with the neckerchief and the bonnet and the dog bowl hat, running frantically around the deck of a ship yelling, “Here Captain! dear father!” Not a pretty picture, is it? I myself think it’s a much more effective poem if the speaker is a young, frightened deck hand, not some scraggly old hysterical poet who calls the president Daddy.
You might say, "Well, it's better for the Captain to drop dead after the ship is safely back in port, rather than on the high seas," but that's just the short view. Whitman knew terror – it's not the loss of the leader that makes this poem so ghoulish, but the knowledge that anyone can be stricken at any time, even after they think that the worst is over. The scariest thing isn't adversity, it's uncertainty. Maybe Walt Whitman did write this with Abraham Lincoln in mind, but it’s much scarier if the Captain is being stalked by nameless, faceless Death than if he’s shot by a disgruntled Confederate actor who is pissed about having to quit with the slavery.