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：2012-2013-1
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A 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.
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Introduction
Walt 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.
Analysis
O 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 Level
Meter
This 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.
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A-stylistic-analysis-of-walt-whitman
