Journey Theme in Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain! and Tennyson’s Crossi

Journey Theme in Whit human races O chieftain My maestro and Tennysons Crossing the Bar A mans journey at ocean has always been romanticized as an single struggle against the backdrop of the cruel elements of nature. Paradoxically, though, within that same journey, the sea possesses an congenital sense of timelessness that can become a mans quest for God. In O Captain My Captain Walt Whitman describes the narrators sense of aimlessness at sea after his beloved Captain dies. In Lord Alfred Tennysons Crossing the Bar, the speaker is beckoned by the sea and its soundlessness even though he senses foredoom there. And so, although both Whitman and Tennyson lend oneself a journey at sea as the predominant ambit and metaphor within similar structural frameworks, they do differ in how they represent the journey and depict the tone of the poem. In O Captain My Captain uses the enchant, the voyage at sea, and the Captain, within the poem to describe the belief of the United States in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The fearful voyage at sea, then, is an appropriate metaphor for the arduous Civil War, which has finally ended, alone ironically, the Captain of the ship, Abraham Lincoln, has fallen dead (Line 2). Whitman uses extensive imagery to describe the North, awaiting the ship to dock, exulting, and their eager faces turning (Whitman, Lines 3, 12). But at the same time, there argon underlying burdens of grief that the war brings. Whitman describes the postwar era with a pervading jeering within the poem although the prize we sought is won, the true reality of the property reflects a phyrric victory (Line 2). The narrators mournful tread on the deck of the ship becomes symbolic for the United States, as the Sout... ...orates the death of the Captain, Tennyson discusses cut through into the realm of the afterlife with a stoic calmness, which ultimately leads a solitary confinement death. However, both poets seem to realize their own mortality an d that death is an long-wearing force. While Tennysons everyday narrator treats crossing the bar as another symbolic stage of the human existence, the beloved Captain is ironically unable to defeat it despite what horrors he may have outgo at sea. Death, then, transcends the social divide no one, from the common man of Tennysons poem to a brave, revered Captain, who has survived the perils at sea, can conquer it. working CitedTennyson, Alfred Lord. Alfred Lord Tennyson Selected Poems. New York Penguin Books , 1992. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1892 ed. New York Bantam Books, 1983.PID 00621Marlow Engl. 12 Sect. 37