Rhetorical Analysis O Captain My Captain

The Gettysburg battle was a major turning point for the Union, but was also a devastating battle because there were over 50,000 casualties. On November 19th, 1863 during the dedication ceremony for the National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Abraham Lincoln gave his famous speech, “The Gettysburg Address.” Lincoln addresses his speech to a whopping audience of 15,000 people. Those 15,000 people consist of family and friends of the deceased soldiers, Union, and activists. His speech is only 272 words and less than three minutes long ,but is able to appeal to the audience. In “The Gettysburg Address,” Lincoln uses the rhetorical strategies allusion, formal diction, anaphora, antithesis, and parallelism to achieve his purpose to honor the soldiers who gave their lives and to remind the nation to keep fighting for liberty and equality that was constructed by the Declaration of Independence.

President Abraham Lincoln used numerous rhetorical devices in his speech at the Second Inaugural Address to present the audience with the effects of the Civil War. The purpose was to edify the audience on his vision for the nation’s future. He adopts an accepting tone in order to appeal to the feelings and concerns of the men present at the Inaugural. After reading the speech, one can observe the appeal to the audience’s emotion, building of self-credibility, and the use of parallelism used by Lincoln to aid in presenting his vision for the future of the nation.

Captain Lincoln Steers the Ship to victory. “Where on the deck my captain lies Fallen cold and dead.”(7-8) This quote from the story refers to the assassination of President Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln was President during the Civil War, and is considered to be one of the greatest presidents of all time. President Lincoln was assassinated on April 14,1865 and was in a coma for 9 hours before he died. With the death of the President the nation lost it’s most important man and a great father and husband. The elegy “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman is an extended metaphor about President Lincoln’s presidency because it compares Lincoln to a ships captain, the Union

Lincoln's mother´s death resulted in his father remarrying a woman named Sarah Johnston. Abraham and Sarah had a unique relationship which became strong and they bonded frequently. Lincoln's father and step-mother were both illiterate, but Sarah encouraged Lincoln to begin reading. He later got a formal education which lasted a total of 18 months. Lincoln was dedicated to learning and took his studies seriously. Lincoln shows the compassion he had in everything that he chose to pursue (Hubbard 2). Lincoln wrote a poem he titled, ¨My Childhood's Home I See Again¨. It says ¨where things decayed and loved ones lost, in dreamy shadows rise,¨ (Lincoln 1). Lincoln was very close with his mother and this part of the poem refers to people dying like his mother did when he was a child (Poetry Foundation 1).

It is not news for anyone to hear that Lincoln changed America, but Whitman explains it a little differently. Looking closer at “Oh Captain! My Captain!” elements of American Romanticism pop out, and one of those major elements is political changes or events. The Event of this is very well known, Lincoln’s assassination. New york Times tells that Whitman was pushed to write this poem after Lincoln’s assassination as a tribute to him. “Generations of historians have described, and tried to interpret the meaning of, this unique funeral procession. But no author has probed the event more deeply than Walt Whitman”. (Griffin, New York Times). This can be shown through the detail of the poem to his assassination. It describes the captain falling cold and dead, which can be a direct correlation to him being shot. His assassination isn't the only thing discussed in this poem. Going back to the metaphors about the voyage, the voyage is described as done. This can show that the civil war was over recently, it ended on April 9th. Lincoln’s assassination took place on April 14th. The close relations of both of these events happening are described like a history lesson through the poem. The second stanza is describing the vents after the war, and the third is describing Lincoln's death. After the war ended the country was in a state of happiness and celebration, but Lincoln was assassinated only a few days later.

In 1863, the Civil War raged on in America and July saw one of the bloodiest battles in American history, and the bloodiest of the Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg came at a tremendous cost to both sides; an estimated 51,000 soldiers died during the three-day onslaught. This battle questioned both sides will to fight. Morale was running extremely low and many people wanted the war to be over. On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg Address to honor the fallen soldiers and to try to revive the war fervor that many Americans had lost.

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States of America, is well known by his presidency, but also his speeches he has presented. He wrote the Gettysburg Address and it emphasized freedom, equality and unity, and symbolized the significance that the Civil War had on the US and formation of the nation. A month prior to the ending of the Civil War, he wrote his Second Inaugural Address, shocking and surprising the audience by including politics, slavery, and states’ rights. Lincoln uses rhetorical devices to contemplate the effect of the Civil War and offers his vision for the future of the nation by providing logic, affectionate tone, and allusion.

Whitman wrote broad stanzas and focused on the whole of America as his inspiration. His lines covered a wide range of topics and generated multiple points of view for the reader. He called his life’s work “Leaves of Grass”; stressing the

"O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done; The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won… The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done; From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won…" Walt Whitman's description of a ship weathering a powerful storm, and returning safe with its mission complete, perfectly illustrates the United States enduring the divisions of the Civil War. This poem is one of numerous commemorations to the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Merrill D. Peterson, author of Lincoln in American Memory, examines an interesting variety of sources, including statues and prints made of Lincoln over the years in addition to the numerous biographies

In his essay “Death of Abraham Lincoln”, Walt Whitman recalls the first time he ever saw the future president elect when Lincoln silently passed through New York City on his way to Washington D. C. Then Whitman remarks on the rapid succession of the well-known, recent, and still yet painful events of the Civil War. The strata of session sympathizers, the assassination of Lincoln at Ford’s theatre by John Wilkes Booth five days after the end of the Civil War, and the effect Lincoln’s death will forever have on our nation. Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist-in addition to publishing his poetry- was a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. The Civil war lasted from 1861 to 1865 and was the result of four

America experienced profound changes during the mid 1800’s. New technologies and ideas helped the nation grow, while the Civil War ripped the nation apart. During this tumultuous period, two great American writers captured their ideas in poetry. Their poems give us insight into the time period, as well as universal insight about life. Although polar opposites in personality, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman created similar poetry. Dickinson’s “Hope is a Thing with Feathers” and Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” share many qualities.

If one listens closely, they can hear America’s song. The words, like thunder, comprise the groans of the slave, the cheers of the free, and the unmistakable sounds of the brave. The music rings out as clear as day; it is composed by the growing children and the dying men. Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes captured the essence of these songs in their respective works, “I Hear America Singing” and “I, Too, Sing America.” The first describes the melodies of a working nation, the “the wood-cutter’s song” and the “delicious singing of the mother” (Whitman 7-8). The quiet musings of a young African American make up the latter; it is a hymn of hushed hope for tomorrow. Although the two poems stand alone, both Whitman’s and Hughes's works powerfully capture the song of America through the sense of pride found in each piece, the uses of different literary elements, and their individual views of the nation.

“O Captain! My Captain!” is one of the most popular poems ever written by Walt Whitman. Upon the initial reading of this poem, one may perceive the poem to be about a loyal captain who leads his crew on a treacherous, but successful, voyage which ends in devastation. If interpreted literally this is the poem’s only meaning, but for those who look further there is an underlying story behind the words of Whitman. Whitman uses multiple literary elements throughout this poem in order to unmask the story of Abraham Lincoln’s journey and ultimate death as a result of the Civil War and his fight to end slavery.

In Walt Whitman’s collection of Leaves of Grass, he includes many poems that are a compilation of his musings and thoughts. One thing that he does throughout his collection is that he creates goals through each poem to get different messages across. Some of his common messages, or underlying themes, are the Self, democracy, and the individual, but an interesting common theme found scattered throughout Leaves of Grass is the cycle of life and death, especially in comparison to the United States, the Civil War, and life itself. In “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” does such thing. Published in 1865, the pastoral elegy was written after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. This is the best way that Walt Whitman mourns a beloved public figure in his own modern world, and also the way he copes with the natural world. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” best captures Whitman’s notion what it means to be human: the common understanding of the never-ending cycle of life and death through the form of the elegy, the symbol of the lilac, and the personification of death.

President Abraham Lincoln, admired by Walt Whitman, blossomed in “Whitman's writing and in American mythology”(Eiselein) for his leadership and nobility. Whitman hoped for a rugged, healthy, who knew what real, physical work was, to be the “[r]edeemer [p]resident of [t]hese [s]tates”(Whitman). His hopes came true “as in a dream”(Whitman) when “four years later, just such a beard-faced boatman”(Goodheart) entered the White House. Walt Whitman discovered the “comprehensive, all-directing soul he had long been seeking”(Reynolds) in Abraham Lincoln’s life. Therefore Whitman, a patriotic American, would see Lincoln’s death as not only a grave tragedy but also a “promise [of] ultimate purgation and unification for America.”(Reynolds).