O Captain! My Captain!: Key Poetic Devices

Apostrophe

Apostrophe (uh-PAW-struh-fee) is a rhetorical figure in which a speaker makes a direct and explicit address, usually to an absent person or to an object or abstract entity. Whitman introduces this figure at the very beginning, with the expostulation “O Captain!” He then develops it in the poem’s second stanza (lines 9–16), where the speaker directly addresses his captain using the second-person pronoun, “you”:

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
   Here Captain! dear father!
   This arm beneath your head!
   It is some dream that on the deck,
   You’ve fallen cold and dead.

The speaker’s use of apostrophe in this passage is powerful precisely because he’s calling out to a man he knows has died. In this regard, the speaker’s use of apostrophe implies a form of denial. It’s as if he’s thinking, How can you be dead when all this celebration is meant for you? I must be dreaming: you can’t be dead! “Rise up” and greet the masses! It’s telling that the speaker ceases to use the second-person address in the third stanza. Once again referring to his dead leader as “My Captain” and “My father” (lines 17 and 18), the speaker now seems to accept the truth of the man’s passing.

Assonance and Consonance

Assonance and consonance are sibling concepts, in that they both refer to the repetition of certain sounds in adjacent or nearby words. Assonance specifically refers to the repetition of vowel sounds, whereas consonance refers to the repetition of consonant sounds. Whitman makes use of both techniques, often weaving them together as he does in line 10:

Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills

The use of consonance here is perhaps most obvious, since four of the words begin with the same F sound: “for you the flag is flung—for you.” As an example of consonance that occurs at the beginning of successive or nearby words, this technically counts as an example of alliteration (uh-LIT-er-AY-shun). More subtle in this same line is Whitman’s use of assonance, which occurs in the oscillation between U and OO sounds: “Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills.” Assonance and consonance appear elsewhere in the poem in similarly shifting ways. Consider, for example, lines 2–3, where repeating A and EH/EE oscillate with I and O sounds:

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting

Also note, in these same lines, the subtle repetition of P and R sounds:

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting

These and other examples of consonance enhance the overall rhetorical power of Whitman’s language.

Extended Metaphor

An extended metaphor functions in the same way as an ordinary metaphor, but it differs in the amount of space allotted for its development. Whereas an ordinary metaphor may be mentioned in passing, an extended metaphor unfolds over the course of many lines. In “O Captain! My Captain!,” Whitman uses the conceit of a ship returning from a dangerous ocean voyage as an extended metaphor for the United States at the end of the Civil War. It’s worth noting that the poem itself doesn’t clarify the metaphorical nature of its conceit. That is, the poem doesn’t offer any telling clues that the ship represents the American nation, nor that the titular captain symbolizes President Abraham Lincoln. That said, for the poem’s first readers, the metaphorical nature of the poem would have been obvious, since Whitman wrote and published it very soon after the Civil War’s end and Lincoln’s assassination. In that context, the image of a ship returning home in a conflicting atmosphere of sadness and celebration would have been easily legible as a metaphor for a battered—but surviving—America.

Repetition

Whitman uses different forms of repetition throughout “O Captain! My Captain!,” and to great rhetorical effect. The title itself introduces the poem’s first type of repetition. Known by the technical name diacope (die-ACK-uh-PEE), this type of repetition involves the recurrence of the same word, separated by one or more other words. The second type of repetition is epizeuxis (EH-pih-ZOOK-sis), which occurs when a single word is repeated in quick succession, as in line 5: “But O heart! heart! heart!” In contrast to the localized rhetorical effects of these types of repetition, Whitman uses two other forms that play more significant roles in shaping the poem’s structure. First, there’s the speaker’s use of anaphora in the second stanza. Anaphora (ann-AF-uh-ruh) involves the use of the same word or phrase to begin a series of linked clauses, as in the case of the repeated “for you” the speaker addresses to his captain (lines 10–12):

Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning

Whitman also uses a form of repetition known as epistrophe (eh-PISS-truh-fee). This technique involves repeating the same words at the end of successive clauses, sentences, or verses, as Whitman has done with the phrase “fallen and dead” (lines 8, 16, and 24), which closes each stanza.

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