Comparing The Raven And O Captain ! My Captain

“The Raven” and “O Captain! My Captain!” Are some of the most famous poems in the world, both are about death, loss, grief, and undying devotion. “The Raven” written by Edgar Allan Poe about his grief of his wife who was struck with illness while “O Captain! My Captain!” Was written by Walt Whitman for the mourning Americans after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. Many similarities and yet so many differences in the stylistic features of the poems.
One of such connections displayed throughout the poems are the tones within and on the ‘outside’ of each poem. ‘Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.’ In the first stanza Whitman jumps right into the grim and mourning tone of narrative using sense description, forcing the audience to imagine the grim nature of war and death, similarly while Poe is more complicated in his descriptions due to the size of

Nevertheless The Raven is ‘never flitting, still sitting, on the pallid bust of Pallas’ as the narrator states that his soul is trapped beneath the raven's shadow and shall be lifted ‘Nevermore’. By using extended metaphors Poe and Whitman create stories of death, loss, grief, mourning and undying devotion, however how they create the metaphors are different and often create different emotions from the audience, this is also evident in the poets theme of