Oh Captain! My Captain!

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d 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!	5
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
2 O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;	10
For you 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,	15
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
3 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;	20
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Beyond bringing to mind images of Dead Poet's Society (which I admittedly, have not seen), "Oh Captain! My Captain! is profoundly sad, which it should be, given that it is a elegy.  

The poem was written by Walt Whitman as a response to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln shortly after the Union victory that ended the civil war.  Whitman was a profoundly patriotic man and had an interest in politics.  He supported the North during the war, not necessarily as a result of any particular feelings of animosity towards slavery, but because he supported the concept of an actually united United States.  As a side note, while Whitman had at times opposed slavery in his poetry, he often viewed abolition as an unnecessarily radical concept which had as its only goal the dissolution of the country and was potentially against democracy.  As to leading to dissolution, he may have been justified.  The assassination occurred five days after the Confederate Army surrendered to the Union, right after Lincoln had won the war.

The poem opens with this victory.  Despite all of the hardships, all of the unnecessary death and violence and war, it was finally over.  Best of all it ends not with a broken, fractured America, but with a whole United States, even if it has more corpses now.  But despite all of this, the man who is responsible for this great victory, who had led the Union through this disastrous period and had led it out whole, the so-called Captain, is dead on the floor.  At first the speaker fails to fully recognize this, even though his captain fails to answer him.  The ship is safe but its captain is not.  The speaker continues to exalt the victory despite the death of his captain, believing the death to be merely a dream.  

The poem is characterized by alternating feelings of exultation combined with the death of the captain that achieved this victory.  By this the victory seems all the more sweet and the death all the more final, though both taint each other, in addition to emphasizing each other's traits.

The speaker often speaks to his captain, before and after he realizes he is dead.  The poem even begins with a call to the captain.  It also utilizes apostrophe in addressing the shore and bells in the third stanza: "Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!"  Again a contrast with the captain's death.  The first stanza begins overwhelmingly happy, victory is won!  Stanza two is celebratory, though doesn't seem quite right, and by the time the third roles around, the captain is dead and the speaker knows this.  Of course, each stanza ends with the same words, the captain has fallen cold and dead.

The saddest element is that despite the captain's unflagging hard work, he is unable to enjoy the fruits of his labor, his victory was stolen from him, though his efforts are left to be enjoyed by everyone else.  Seems rather selfless, even if it was done so inadvertently.