The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
2
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
 This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck
You've fallen cold and dead.
The speaker calls the Captain “father,” another sign of his deep respect. Here Lincoln is metaphorically the father of the national family as well as the captain of the  ship of state. 
 Compare Whitman’s  “As I Ebb’d With the Ocean of Life,”  in which he portrays his native shore as a “father” to which he clings: 
 I throw myself upon your breast my father, I cling to you so that you cannot unloose me, I hold you so firm till you answer me something. 
 Some critics have suggested a link between these father figures and Whitman’s actual father, Walter Whitman, Sr., with whom the poet had a troubled relationship. Whitman, Sr. died shortly after the first edition of  Leaves of Grass  appeared in 1855. In his reading of “As I Ebb’d,” R. W. French  comments : 
 As is often pointed out, Whitman generally shows little sympathy for father figures; the best-known such figure in his poetry, for example, is the distant and fearsome father of “There Was a Child Went Forth,” a representation of power, injustice, and oppression. It is a sign of the new-found humility in this poem that the poet can plead as he does with the “father,” the land.
O Captain My Captain