Rhythm and rhyme

Walt Whitman always viewed his poems as songs and tried to make them sound and melodious as possible. Giving poems a certain melody mostly depends on the choices authors make in terms of rhythm and rhyme.

“O Captain! My Captain” has an iambic meter, meaning one unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed one, like in “our fearful trip is done” (l. 1).

However, you will notice that the poet does not use iambs all throughout the poem. In fact, they only appear in the second half of lines 1, 2, 9, 10, 17, 18.

Whitman combines the iambs with something we call amphibrach. In such a rhythmic scheme, a stressed syllable is surrounded by two unstressed syllables, like in “O Captain! my Captain!” (l. 1).

Lines 3, 4, 11, and 12 also include amphibrach at t...