O Captain! My captain! by Walt Whitman
...th anything. The next line ‘c’ rhymes with ‘d’ and the last line ‘e’ also rhymes with ‘d’. I like the way it all looks and comes together in the end. It gives it more of a traditional or aged feeling. I can only imagine how time consuming it must be to make sure to nail a difficult rhyme scheme like that in more than one stanza. Another poetic device is repetition of the word ‘captain’. Repetition is a word, phrase, or line that is repeated in a poem, usually at the same point in each stanza. a “O Captain! My captain! Rise up and hear the bells; a Rise up – for you the flag is flung – for you the bugle trills, b For you bouquets and ribboned weahs – for you the shores a-crowding, b For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! Dear Father! c The arm beneath your head! d It is some dream that on the deck, e You’ve fallen cold and dead.” The writer uses “O Captain! My captain!” at the beginning of each stanza. The repetition of that word is to emphasize how important it is in the poem. The captain, or Lincoln is also called father in the poem because he was the father of our country. Whitman seems to like to overstress the repetitive use of exclamation marks as well. It’s effective to repeat some parts in a poem to help give the reader time to digest ideas from the rest of the text. It also emphasizes the importance of the word ‘captain’. The last poetic device is symbolic. Symbolism is the use of words for an indirect suggestion rather than a direct expression. The whole poem is based on symbolism. In each of the three stanzas in the poem, there is a different meaning to each one. The first stanza is about Abraham Lincoln’s death. The word ‘captain’ refers to Lincoln. ‘Fearful trip’ means the civil war. The ‘ship’ means the United States and the ‘port’ means the end of the civil war. The second stanza describes the people missing Lincoln. People prepared bouquets and ribboned weahs for him, but he was assassinated. In the last stanza the first two lines describe poetically that he is dead, but the United States is safe since the Civ...