In “O Captain! My captain!” by Walt Whitman and “Elegy for J.F.K.” by W.H. Auden, the two poets express the same feelings of shock, loss, and reverence; however, they do so in different ways. The two authors react to the sudden loss of a national leader and try to process their mixed feelings. Looking at the two poems, the authors use theme, tone, structure, and rhyme in both similar and different ways to express the same emotions.
Both authors wrote their poems for a historical figure after an assassination. Whitman “memorialized [Abraham Lincoln] with ‘O Captain! My Captain!’” after his assassination in 1865 (Lorcher). Auden wrote “Elegy for J.F.K” in 1964, after having dinner with composer Igor Stravinsky (Counts). The composer suggested a collaboration in memory of John F. Kennedy after his assassination (Counts). Both poems, despite their differences, have the same tone. The tone expresses the emotional contrast between celebrating someone’s life and mourning their death. While that’s true of any elegy, it’s more apparent in these poems because the subjects were such great historical figures with grand achievements.…show more content… In “O Captain! My Captain!” , Walt Whitman repeats that “on the deck” Abraham Lincoln is implied to have “fallen cold and dead” . In “Elegy for J.F.K.” Auden repeats the first stanza as the last stanza. He repeats it to emphasize his conflicted feelings about J.F.K.’s sudden death; that you have to celebrate his life and mourn his death. However, even though they both use repetition, the authors formatted their poems differently. Whitman indented the last four lines of each stanza while Auden decided to use a more standard format of five stanzas, three lines each, and 17 syllables per
