A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Walt Whitman’s Poem “O Captain! My Captain!”

“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.