Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892) is one of the most beloved American poets of all time. With the recent death of Robin Williams, who popularized “O Captain! My Captain!” as John Keating in the film Dead Poets Society, interest in Whitman’s poem to Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!,” has bloomed in a perfect memorial to the actor.
Walt Whitman wrote several poems in dedication to Lincoln and all of them are elegies; the elegy is a poetic form that deals with death – remembering those who died, mourning them, and responding to their deaths.
The elegy is not a popular form in the modern day; those vaguely familiar with the term may associate it with the famous elegies of history – namely, John Milton’s elegy to Edward Lear, Lycidas, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s elegy to John Keats, Adonais. Both of these poems are fantastic if you’re a scholar of poetry; but, to the uninitiated, they are inaccessible due to their complexity and age.
I’ve written this to segue from the death of Robin Williams (and the subsequent popularity of “O Captain! My Captain”) into the poetry of Walt Whitman, who has elegies that are somewhat more accessible than those of Shelley and Milton. The elements of an elegy are not fully described here – rather, I just wish to introduce you to some elegies you might not have ever read and demonstrate the broad range of poetic types the umbrella term “elegy” covers. Not all elegies are sad, nor are they all extremely complex in the fashion of Lycidas and Adonais. Don’t ignore the elegy because of its popular connotations – instead explore the elegies of Whitman and learn how wide-ranging the term can be.
First, some historical details:
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, was a major dramatic event in American history and there are details about the aftermath of Lincoln’s death that are often forgotten in the modern day. It was decided that Lincoln should be buried in Illinois, his home state, rather than Washington D.C., and after a huge funeral service in Washington D.C., a train, covered in the black of mourning and holding Lincoln’s coffin, began a ceremonial journey that crossed the East in a long, circuitous path that would eventually bring Lincoln’s coffin to Springfield, Illinois. At every stop the train made, buildings were draped in black and ceremonies were held, among them: the tolling of bells, religious services, musical dedications, and long processions. Reportedly, the lines of citizens waiting to pass by Lincoln’s body were tremendous. Lincoln’s young son William, who had died a few years prior to Lincoln’s assassination, was also disinterred from its resting place and brought on the train to be reburied in the same tomb that would hold Lincoln’s coffin.
Whitman, and others, had a lot of material to draw from. Many of the sermons preached and poems written on Lincoln’s death called him a “martyr” (making an analogy to the death of Jesus Christ, a particularly apt and obvious choice since Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday), compared him to Moses (because Moses led the Hebrews out of Egyptian slavery and into the promised land, and Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation).
Whitman wrote his first poem in memory of Lincoln on May 4, 1865 (only about twenty days after Lincoln’s death):
Hush’d Be the Camps To-day
Hush’d Be the Camps To-day,
And soldiers let us drape our war-worn weapons,
And each with musing soul retire to celebrate,
Our dear commander’s death.
No more for him life’s stormy conflicts,
Nor victory, nor defeat –– no more time’s dark events,
Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.
But sing poet in our name,
Sing of the love we bore him –– because you, dweller in camps,
know it truly.
As they invault the coffin there,
Sing –– as they close the doors of earth upon him –– one verse,
For the heavy hearts of soldiers.
“O Captain! My Captain!” wasn’t dated by Whitman, but it has been argued the it is the second poem in the series since it replies to the collective wish of the soldiers in “Hush’d Be the Camps” – the poet, Whitman, does compose and sing a song in their voice.
The speaker of “O Captain! My Captain!” is supposed to be a young recruit on the ship, so Whitman composes the poem in a ballad-measure that was popular in the folk-poetry of the time.
O Captain! My Captain!
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship was weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The post 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 the bouquets and ribbon’d 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 anchor’d 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.
Next, Whitman wrote a poem in his own voice, rather than that of soldiers or anyone else. It’s called “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and is 206 lines long; I won’t quote it all here but you can read it on Genius.
But even after Whitman’s elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” was done, Whitman still wanted to write one more poem on Lincoln. In 1871, he wrote an epitaph for the dead president. The word epitaph carries certain connotations (it comes from Greek: epi means “upon” and tophos means “tomb,” so “upon a tomb”) and thus the speaker of the has no real “voice” (or if it does, it is the voice of History), and it must be short enough to fit on a tombstone, and it is speaking on Lincoln, not as a man, but as a historical figure.
This Dust Was Once the Man
This dust was once the man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of these States.
Within these four poems, with study, we learn about not only Lincoln and Whitman, but the art of the elegy. All of these poems are elegies, but they show the broadness of the form and the different possible subgenres: the mournful, broad elegy voiced by a group (“Hush’d Be the Camps To-day”); the intensely personal and emotional elegy voiced by a naïve speaker (the young sailor in “O Captain! My Captain!”); the true personal elegy of a poet reflecting upon the death of Lincoln (“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”); and the impersonal, historical elegy (“This Dust Was Once the Man”).
No better poem could have been chosen to remember Robin Williams after his death – even if the choice was somewhat by happenstance, recalling him by reading or listening to “O Captain! My Captain” brings us back to the form of the elegy, immediately throwing us into Whitman’s related elegies, and thereby making us consider the elegy in general.
It is rare for great men to receive beautiful dedications in the modern age, and, one reason for that is the misunderstanding of the elegiac form. Robert Frost wrote:
A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get among the poems where they hold each other apart in their places as the stars do.I ask you to find an “A” – perhaps one of these poems – and use it to move on to your “B.”
-- A. B. Schmidt
