O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN!:
STUDY QUESTIONS

 Argue the point that this poem belittles the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by implying that the president slipped on a banana peel and cracked his skull.

Imagine if Whitman had said that the Captain, instead of lying dead on the deck, had instead gotten seasick and thrown up on the deck: what would that be saying metaphorically about Lincoln and his term in office?

Would you read more poems if they had exclamation points in their titles?  Perhaps the whole problem with poetry is that it simply does not call enough attention to itself.

There are places where this poem rhymes the way God intended poems to rhyme, teaming words like “done” and “won,” “dead” and “red,” “head” and “dead,” and “still” and “will.” But then, there are similar places where the words paired together are things like “exulting” and “daring,” and “bells” and “trills.” Do you think Walt Whitman just got too lazy to find words that actually rhymed when he wrote this poem? Or did he just not notice that some of his rhymes didn’t rhyme, giving them the same lack of attention we could expect of a man who forgot to shave for thirty years.

Some critics believe that, if Lincoln really had lain on a ship’s deck in a pool of blood and if Whitman really had written a poem that calls him the captain, Lincoln would have jumped up and maybe even said “Boo.” Research Lincoln’s legendary sense of humor and explain your theory about whether or not it would amuse him to see Walt Whitman crap in his pants.

Why do you think Whitman referred to Lincoln as “my captain” instead of “our captain”? Do you think the walls of Whitman’s bedroom were plastered with pictures himself and Lincoln, awkwardly pasted together, in sailor outfits?