湖南科技大学外国语学院课程学期论文课程名称：英语修辞学论文题目：A stylistic analysis of Walt Whitman’s poem“O Captain! my Captain!”姓 名：吴 飞班 级：教育二班学 号：0912010401学年学期：2012-2013-1A stylistic analysis of Walt Whitman’s poem“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. IntroductionWalt Whitman was the first major poet to create a truly American vision and style. His extraordinary example gave American verse much of its subsequent character and diction. Rejecting traditional constraints of form and subject matter, Whitman considered democracy itself appropriate grist for his own poetic mill, inventing a radically different sort of free verse to express what he had to say.Whitman had a strong belief that nature was the root of all beautiful things, whether it was the smell of a flower, or the light of the moon anything that was natural had internal beauty and thereby had the possibility to make humanity beautiful. In many of his poems Whitman depicts that nature is what depicts the true soul of a man and has the power to both display it and control it. These aspects of nature were large parts of the American Romantic movement, which shows Whitman’s relationship to the American Romantics. AnalysisO Captain! My Captain! three-stanza poem by Walt Whitman, first published in Sequel to Drum-Taps in 1865. From 1867 the poem was included in the 1867 and subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass. O Captain! My Captain! is an elegy on the death of Pres. Abraham Lincoln. It is noted for its regular form, meter, and rhyme, though it is also known for its sentimentality verging on the maudlin. The poem, which was highly popular, portrays Lincoln as the captain of a sea-worn ship-the Union triumphant after the American Civil War. While “The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,” the Captain lies on the deck, “Fallen cold and dead.”Ⅰ. At the Phonological LevelMeterThis poem was thought of as the most traditional works of Whitman because of its strict meter, which reflects on the application of iambic throughout the whole poem. “the port is near, the bells i hear”, the meter just act as the waving waves. In this poem, Walt Whitman also adopted a complex pattern, which consisted of mixed lines of heptameter, trimeter and tetrameter. The poem contains three stanzas, and each of that consists of 8 lines. The first for lines is heptameter, while the next four lines are tetrameter or trimeter. Having adopted this kind of meter, the author expressed his deep sorrow completely.Rhyme Whitman’s choice of rhymes went along with her strict application of meter. He employed the rhymes of “aabbcded” through this poem.The first four lines are two couplets and their rhyme is done/won and exulting/daring; bells/trills and a-crowding; still/will and done/won. The next four lines used the forms of “cded”, which reflects on heart/red/lies/dead, captain/head/deck/dead and bell/tread/lies/dead.Besides, many words also used rhyme. For example, “cold and dead”,”pale and still”, which had contributed to make the poem full of musicality.ApostropheApostrophe is a figure of speech which a thing, place, idea or person (dead or absent) is addressed as if present, listening and understanding what is being said. In the poem, Whitman used apostrophe in many places. “O captain! My captain!””But O heart! heart! heart!””Here Captain! dear father!”, which had expressed author’s deep sorrow and could easily cause the resonance of readers.Apostrophe is also one of the most important stylistics in this poem. The poet use second person together with first and third person to develop the poem. Sometimes he just like whisper to himself, sometimes he seems to cry to others, while sometimes it looks like he was crying to Lincoln. Alliteration It has to do with the sound rather than the sense of words for effect. It is a device that repeats the same sound at frequent intervals and since the sound repeated is usually the initial consonant sound, it is also called "front rhyme". For instance, “the ship is anchor’d safe and sound.”rhetorical repetition Rhetorical repetition is an instance of using a word, phrase, or clause more than once in a short passage--dwelling on a point. In this poem, Whitman adopted this kind of stylistic in both stanzas. For example, in the first stanza, the author cried:”The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting”. In the second stanza, he cried that “ Rise up--for you the flag is flung-for you the bugle trills”. In the last stanza,the line “Exult O shores, and ring O bells” is rhetorical repetition as well. Which had given much power to this poem.The most appreciated thing is that Whitman always combine many stylistic together. For instance, he combined apostrophe and rhyme with rhetorical repetition in some lines, such as “Here captain! Dear captain!”.Ⅱ. At the Graphological LevelconfigurationThe shape of the poem had arranged carefully by the poet. The first four lines of each stanzas are aligning left with no space at the beginning of each line., while in the followed four lines, each stich get two characters more than the before stich. What’s more, the second to the forth lines are the longest ones, while the first lines are shorter than them but longer than the rest of stichs. This kind of arrangement makes the shape of the poem seems just like a ship. And at the beginning of each ship/stanza, there lies the word “O/My Captain”. It can conclude that Whitman had used the shape of the poem to implicate his respect to Lincoln. capitalizationThe tendency that Whitman had to capitalize nouns aimed at giving additional emphasis to the capitalized words at times, while being idiosyncratic. In this poem, all the “Captain”s as well as “O”s were capitalized, from which Whitman had expressed his special respect and deep sorrow to Abraham Lincoln.Ⅲ. At the Semantic LevelMetaphor Metaphor makes a comparison between two unlike elements, but different from a simile, this comparison is implied rather than stated. In this poem, Whitman had compared America which had experienced the Civil War only just to a ship which had succeeded suffered a storm recently, and compared president Abraham Lincoln who was assassinated when the victory was coming to the captain who had sacrificed before achieving at the coast. This stylistic won a great shocking for the poem and made it being one of the most classical imagery in the history of literature. Antithesis In rhetoric, an antithesis is two sharply contrasting ideas balanced across a sentence. On the one hand, beside the coast there were vast of people with “bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths” to celebrate the return of the ship, but on the other hand, the narrator on the deck was in deep sorrow about the death of the captain. This sharp contrast had brought a dramatically effect. For example, in the first stanza, when the ship has weathered every rack, the people were all exulting, but the narrator was nearly break dow, ”O heart! heart! Heart!”conclusionWhitman had used variety of rhetorics in this poem, especially he used to combine different rhetorics together to make a classical but depressing poet. Which had brought great success to his work and made a great influence for America as well as the world. In this poem, Whitman had expressed his great respect to the great captain of America and at the seem time, he also expressed his deep sorrow to the death of him.ReferencesDongqiming. 2009. English Stylistics: A New Coursebook [G]. Bejing: Foreing language teaching and research press.Hallengren, Anders. The Code of Concord. Emerson's Search for Universal Laws. Stockholm: almqvist & Wiksell International, 1994. 287-301.Trent Lorcher, & S. Forsyth. 2012. Analysis of "O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitma [M]. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Voices Visions: Walt Whitman. Wilson, Leslie Perrin. Thoreau, Emerson and Transcendentalism. 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