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Oh Captain ! My Captain, And Walt Whitman's War

Decent Essays

On April 15, 1865, millions of Americans were in mourning, as one of the greatest presidents in all of American history had died. Over one hundred years after Lincoln’s death a woman named Elizabeth Kubler-Ross made one of the greatest observations in psychology history. In 1969, her book called On Death and Dying, she coined the 5 stages of grieving as we know them today. One last character completes the scene, that is Walter Whitman, a poet, who wrote the poem “O Captain! My Captain” a hundred years before she coined the stages of grief. However, the number of years between these two events does not seem to make a difference considering Whitman’s poem, and his metaphors perfectly represent Kubler-Ross’s theory. This means that he was truly grieving, along with the rest of America, but it also makes, this metaphor an important part of psychology and history. Walt Whitman uses the metaphor of a sailor mourning the his dead sea captain to compare it to Whitman’s grief for the death of Abraham Lincoln is used in the poem, “Oh Captain! My Captain,” and it perfectly captures the essences of Kubler-Ross’s grief theory. The poem starts out with the narrator telling the captain of the ship that the crew has accomplished their goal, they have won a battle at sea. The ship and crew is riding the waves back to the port, where he can already hear bells and people celebrating their victory. Then he relates the horrible news to the reader, his captain is dead, and cannot celebrate

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