Favorite Whitman Poem

http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/194  -- This is my favorite Walt Whitman poem.

"O Captain! My Captain!" is my favorite Walt Whitman poem for many reasons. One of the major reasons that it is my favorite is because of the multitude of ways that it can be interpreted. Taken at its literal meaning, the poem describes a ship that is returning from a journey. The ship has sought and found what it was searching for, but the captain did not make it back alive. He lies cold and dead on the deck of the ship. Many people come and place flowers on the deck of the ship in honor of the captain, who was probably respected by many. Again, the poem repeats that whatever the captain and his crew were searching for was found, but the captain is still dead.

Taken at a very specific interpretation, the captain can be assumed to be Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's mission, the item the ship was searching for, was to reunite the Union during the Civil War. The captain in the story was killed after the ship came back from its mission, meaning that its goal was completed. Lincoln was assassinated, but not until after the end of the Civil War. Many people came to mourn the death of the captain. Thousands of Americans mourned the death of Abraham Lincoln. The poem can also be taken 180 degrees in the opposite direction. The ship in the poem could represent the Confederacy. The captain, much like the captain in the south, is represented as slavery. When the Confederacy came out of the civil war, slavery was dead to the Union. Many southerners were upset by the end of slavery, and Confederacy was no longer a country.

The most popular interpretation of the poem is probably the first of the two, but I believe that both are very valid interpretations. Whitman uses the strategy of repetition, repeating the phrase "fallen cold and dead" through out his poem. Whitman's poem was written in a time following the Civil War, which is why the previous two interpretations come to mind over others. Overall, "O Captain! My Captain!" is a great poem.