Abstract
“O Captain! My Captain!”, written by Walt Whitman, one of the most talented poets in American history, is an elegy on the death of Pres. Abraham Lincoln. It portrays Lincoln as the captain of a sea-worn ship, which implies the Union triumphant after the American Civil War. By drawing on multimodal discourse analysis and its theoretical framework of Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, this paper seeks to explore its meaning from both literary and non-literary aspects. The ideational function of the poem presents readers largely material processes, which post a whole dynamic scene. Whitman calls the captain “captain”, “my captain” and “father”. The change indicates that the author’s mourning seems to transcend the sorrow of a citizen for the assassination of a leader to become more like that of a son for his father. Cohesive markers of conjunction glue everything together and make the poem ship-like. To connect literature with linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis provides a new way to interpret Whitman’s poem and helps to understand the poem better.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: Scholars International Journal of Linguistics and Literature
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
