OK, anyone
who’s ever researched me know I credit old Good & Gray with being the poet
whose work actually kept me being a poet, rather than just another short-term
wannabe. His stature as most influential poet in world history is really
indisputable. True poetic modernity began with WW. That said he did publish
poetry before Leaves of Grass rolled out in 1855. But it was formalist
treacle. Fortunately he abandoned that. Only a handful of post LOG-1855 poems
featured such formalist pretensions. All were not in a league with the best from
LOG, but at least 1 of them became 1 of the 4 or 5 most famous poems in the WW
canon. It was written on the murder of Abraham Lincoln, & got wide
republication in contemporary magazines of the day. O Captain! My Captain!
is a better poem than most of WW’s contemporary poetasters could muster, but
I’ll show it does not hold up to better poems on the same theme. But, 1st,
the obligatory online bio:
Born on May
31, 1819, Walt Whitman was the second son of Walter Whitman, a housebuilder, and
Louisa Van Velsor. The family of 9 lived in Brooklyn and Long Island in the
1820s and 1830s. At the age of twelve Whitman began to learn the printer's
trade. Self-taught, he became acquainted with the works of Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare, and the Bible. In 1836 he began his career as teacher in Long
Island. He continued to teach until 1841, when he turned to journalism. He
founded a weekly newspaper, Long-Islander, and edited a number of
Brooklyn and New York papers. In 1848, Whitman left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
to become editor of the New Orleans Crescent. It was in New Orleans he
learned to hate slavery.
On his
return to Brooklyn in 1848 he founded the Brooklyn Freeman. In 1855,
Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass,
which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume
himself, and sent a copy to Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman released a second
edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-three poems, a letter from
Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in
response. During his subsequent career, Whitman continued to refine the volume,
publishing several more editions of the book.
At the
outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a "purged" and
"cleansed" life. He wrote freelance journalism and visited the wounded
at New York-area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D.C. in December
1862 to care for his brother who had been wounded in the war. Overcome by the
suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in
the hospitals. Whitman stayed in the city for eleven years. He took a job as a
clerk for the Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the
Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of
Grass, which Harlan found offensive. Harlan fired the poet.
Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his
life. In Washington he lived on a clerk's salary and modest royalties, and spent
any excess money, including gifts from friends, to buy supplies for the patients
he nursed. He had also been sending money to his widowed mother and an invalid
brother. From time to time writers both in the states and in England sent him
"purses" of money so that he could get by.
In the
early 1870s, Whitman settled in Camden, where he had come to visit his dying
mother at his brother's house. However, after suffering a stroke, Whitman found
it impossible to return to Washington. He stayed with his brother until the 1882
publication of Leaves of Grass gave Whitman enough money to buy a home in
Camden. In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman spent his declining
years working on additions and revisions to a new edition of the book and
preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye, My Fancy (1891).
After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and
had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery.
Walt Whitman was an American poet and a son of Long
Island. His collection of poems, "Leaves of Grass" was a continuing
endeavor, growing from the original volume of 12 works first published in 1855
to an edition of over 300 works at the time of his death in 1892. The collection
is considered one of the world's major literary works and stands as a
revolutionary development in poetry: Walt's free verse and rhythmic innovations
stand in marked contrast to the rigid rhyming and structural patterns formerly
considered so essential to poetic expression.
Whitman
wrote in a form similar to "thought-rhythm". This form is found in Old
Testament poetry and in sacred books of India such as the Bhagavad-Gita, which
Whitman knew in translation. His rhythms and cadences are also heavily
influenced by the music he heard as a regular devotee of the opera in New York
City. The musical nature of Whitman's poetry is evident in the fact that no
poetry has been set to music more often than his. From Vaughan Williams to
Delius and Holst, Hindemith to Sessions and Rorem, the catalog is extremely rich
and varied. The universal appeal of this warm hearted, idealistic and romantic
creative genius is powerful and undeniable. "Leaves of Grass"
transcends time and place and has something to say to all people, for all time.
Memories
Of President Lincoln was the section of LOG that contained both OCMC &
the far superior Lincoln elegy When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.
Let’s gander at the titular poem, & then a similar portion of Lilacs:
O Captain! My Captain!
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
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 ribboned 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.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
The repetons
at the end of each stanza alleviate some of the clichés (underlined) but
is the reader taken to new levels. As a monody it’s ok, but as an elegy it
lacks the oomph to push it to another level. Look at the freshness of imagery
& metaphor from this piece of When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd &
the difference is stark:
14
Now while I sat in the day and look'd forth,
In the close of the day with its light and the fields of
spring, and the farmers preparing their crops,
In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes
and forests,
In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb'd winds
and storms,)
Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing,
and the voices of children and women,
The many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they sail'd,
And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields
all busy with labor,
And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on,
each with its meals and minutia of daily usages,
And the streets how their throbbings throbb'd, and the
cities pent -- lo, then and there,
Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me
with the rest,
Appear'd the cloud, appear'd the long black trail,
And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of
death.
Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of
me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the
hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in
the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and the ghostly pines so
still.
And the singer so shy to the rest receiv'd me,
The gray-brown bird I know received us comrades three,
And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.
From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.
And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.
Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
Prais'd be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love -- but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.
Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come
unfalteringly.
Approach strong deliveress,
When it is so, when you have taken them I joyously sing the
dead,
Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O death.
From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and
feastings for thee,
And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread
sky are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.
The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I
know,
And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil'd death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.
Over the treetops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields
and the prairies wide,
Over the dense-packed cities and all the teeming wharves
and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.
Note how this
section of the poem starts off in introspection, shifts to a vision that is both
different from the opening, yet in accord. It is symbolic, but also philosophic.
The imagery is far fresher (with 2 or 3 exceptions) & the section ends with
the speaker accepting & wiser than where he started. OCMC, on the other
hand, takes us nowhere new, & once the poem is done we are none the wiser.
Not that grief, in & of itself, cannot sustain a poem- it’s just that in
OCMC the grief is so familiar that we are not as moved as we would be were the
imagery fresher. You can only cry a 1st tear once. To freshen up OCMC
we’ll need to tweak some of the couplets & freshen some imagery:
O Captain! My Captain!
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every tack, the prize we sought is none,
The port is near, the bells I fear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and listing;
But O heart!
O the bleeding drops of dread,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
The
1st stanza now is not as sure of itself (none for won)
& by weathering a tack, rather than a rack, the speaker implies a subtler
form of death did in Lincoln. Listing for daring removes the
Victorian pomp & substitutes an almost Thomas Hardy like inevitability. As
for the refrain- 1 heart suffices, & the shortness of the line acts as
almost an inhalation- a stifling of sorrow. It’s a subliminal effect where
sound comes to the for in a utile way.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the swells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and other wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold- instead.
Swells adds to the nautical flavor of the poem, while ‘other’ is a better word than ‘ribboned because it’s a) less expected & b) implies a laurel of a less material sort is in the hearts of the people. Again I install an ‘inhalation’ in the refrain, & ‘instead’ is more effective than the repeated ‘dead’ because we know that dead is coming. The dash before instead, however, portrays the speaker as perhaps wishing or expecting this to be a bad dream.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and nil;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safely ground, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with what as won?
Exult O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold with dread.
Nil is
an improvement on still because it leaves the very description up for
question- are the lips nil because of death, or simply not important to the
speaker because they cannot speak anymore? Safely ground is, at least, a
slight improvement over the terrible safe and sound. Another inhalation
& the ending of ‘with dread’ pushes the end moment of the poem on to the
speaker- who really is the subject of the poem. Lincoln is merely the vehicle
used to acquaint us to him.
I would
tinker a bit more, myself, but that would too de-Whitmanize the poem. My version
is better, but I doubt it’ll nudge the original from anthologies- 140 years is
too big a head start, even for a poem begging to be bettered!
Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain!:
75
TOP’s O Captain! My Captain!: 82
Return
to TOP
