Activity
Historical Heroes
1.8
SUGGESTED LEARNING STRATEGIES: Diffusing, KWHL Chart, Marking
the Text, Skimming/Scanning, TP-CASTT
Before Reading
Fill out the KWHL chart on what you know about the following:
• American Civil War
• Abraham Lincoln
• Frederick Douglass
K (What I
Know)
W (What I Want
to know)
H (How I will
learn it)
L (What I
Learned)
Civil War:
© 2011 College Board. All rights reserved.
Abraham
Lincoln:
Frederick
Douglass:
Unit 1 • The Challenge of Heroism 21
Activity 1.8
continued
Historical Heroes
Word
Connections
Allegory has the Greek
roots -allo- or -all-,
meaning “other” and
-gor- from the words for
marketplace and speaking
publicly.
The essential meaning
of allegory is speaking
“otherwise” or
“figuratively.”
During Reading
“O Captain! My Captain!”
The poem “O Captain! My Captain!” is an example of an allegory.
Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and
actions in a narrative have meanings outside the narrative itself. The
underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance,
and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas such as
charity, greed, or envy. Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a
literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.
Whitman wrote this poem as a memorial for Abraham Lincoln after
his death.
1. As your teacher reads the poem, mark the text by circling all words
having to do with a ship or voyage. Also circle the word Captain and
its synonyms in the poem.
2. Whom is Whitman referring to as the “Captain” of the ship?
Literary terms
3. What do you think the ship represents?
Free verse is poetry without
a fixed pattern of meter and
rhyme.
4. What is the effect of the rhyme scheme?
“Frederick Douglass”
As your teacher reads this poem, mark the text by circling the words it
and thing every time they are used in the poem.
5. What do the words it and thing refer to in the poem?
6. What is the effect of the free verse?
22 SpringBoard® English Textual Power™ Level 3
© 2011 College Board. All rights reserved.
A rhyme scheme is a
consistent pattern of
rhyming words at line
endings throughout a poem.
Poetry
Activity 1.8
continued
by Walt Whitman
My Notes
T
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
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,
P
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
5
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung— or you the bugle trills;
C
10
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the
shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces
© 2011 College Board. All rights reserved.
turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
A
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
15
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
S
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and
done;
T
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won:
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
20
T
Fallen cold and dead. Unit 1 • The Challenge of Heroism 23
Activity 1.8
continued
Historical Heroes
My Notes
Poetry
About the Authors
Walt Whitman (1819 –1892) is now considered one of America’s
greatest poets, but his untraditional poetry was not well
received during his lifetime. As a young man, he worked as
a printer and a journalist while writing free-verse poetry. His
collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, first came out in 1855, and
he revised and added to it several times over the years.
Robert Hayden (1913 –1980) grew up in a poor neighborhood of
Detroit, won a scholarship to college, and became a politically
active writer. One of his interests was African American history,
which he explores in some of his poetry.
5
10
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this
beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,1
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
1 diastole, systole: the normal, rhythmic contraction and expansion of the
chambers of the heart.
24 SpringBoard® English Textual Power™ Level 3
© 2011 College Board. All rights reserved.
by Robert Hayden
Activity 1.8
continued
After Reading
In small groups, use the TP-CASTT strategy to analyze and discuss both
poems. Write your analysis in the My Notes space or on separate paper.
Writing Prompt: Using your TP-CASTT notes, write a literary analysis
paragraph in the space below in which you address the following
questions. Use textual evidence to support your analysis.
• What traits do Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass exhibit to
be considered heroes?
Literary terms
A metaphor is a comparison
between two unlike things
in which one thing is spoken
of as if it were another.
A simile is a comparison
between two unlike things
using the words like or as.
© 2011 College Board. All rights reserved.
• How does the tone of either poem support the perception of
Lincoln or Douglass as a hero?
Unit 1 • The Challenge of Heroism 25