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

Journey Theme in Whitmans O passkey My passe-partout and Tennysons Crossing the Bar A mans journey at sea has always been romanticized as an individualistic struggle against the backdrop of the criminal elements of nature. Paradoxically, though, within that same journey, the sea possesses an innate sense of timelessness that can become a mans quest for God. In O victor My headman Walt Whitman describes the narrators sense of aimlessness at sea after his beloved Captain dies. In Lord Alfred Tennysons Crossing the Bar, the vocalizer is beckoned by the sea and its soundlessness even though he senses foredoom there. And so, although both Whitman and Tennyson employ a voyage at sea as the frequent image 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 ship, the voyage at sea, and the Captain, within the poem to describe the mood of the fall in States in the immediat e aftermath of the Civil War. The fearful voyage at sea, then, is an appropriate metaphor for the arduous Civil War, which has finally ended, but 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 number (Whitman, Lines 3, 12). But at the same time, there are underlying burdens of grief that the war brings. Whitman describes the postwar era with a pervading irony within the poem although the honour we sought is won, the true reality of the situation 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 crossing into the realm of the afterlife with a stoic calmness, which ultimately leads a solitary death. However, both poets seem to realize their own fatality rate and that death is an indestructi ble 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 overcome 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.Works 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