O Captain! My Captain! Men and Masculinity Quotes

The speaker does a literary double-dip here. He uses the heart in both an apostrophe and a synecdoche to communicate the emotional bonds he feels for the captain.

The words “dear father” communicate a positive emotional bond with the captain (as opposed to "I hate you, Dad!"). The captain is a positive father-figure and we see male-bonding at its most successful.

The intimacy of nursing isn’t thought of as masculine in our current culture, but in Whitman’s culture, almost all nurses were in fact men. For real. You can read Whitman’s about emotional bonds with wounded and dying soldiers in his Memoranda During the War.

It's interesting that the speaker pays attention to the captain's lips in this moment. Do you think that's a natural place to focus on? After all, still, pale lips are a pretty good sign of death. Or does this suggest something more than platonic male bonding on the part of the speaker?

Although the captain isn’t actually the speaker’s father (as far as we know), the relationship between the father and the son may be the most precious and desired bond for Whitman. The fact that death interrupts this bond is really just a terrific bummer.