LibriVox volunteers bring you 18 recordings of "O Captain! My Captain!" This was the Weekly Poetry for the week of August 17, 2014."O Captain! My Captain!" is an elegy for Abraham Lincoln written by Walt Whitman, who worked as a clerk and army hospital nurse during the Civil War. The Captain of the poem is Lincoln, and the ship represents the United States, brought safely through the storm of war. In the poem, Whitman juxtaposes the people's joy at the end of the war with his grief at the assassination of the President.