Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Contributing a verse

O Captain! My Captain! The line has already been invoked, most notably by Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon, in tribute to the loss of comedian and actor Robin Williams, who killed himself at the age of 63.

O Captain! My Captain!

The line has already been invoked, most notably by Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon, in tribute to the loss of comedian and actor Robin Williams, who killed himself at the age of 63. It`s from the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society, in which Williams plays English teacher John Keating.

Keating tells his students if they ever want his attention to say "O Captain! My Captain" and explains it comes from Walt Whitman's poem of the same name. Whitman wrote the piece as he mourned the death of President Abraham Lincoln but his words also lend a little comfort to the loss of a great wit: "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."

There are other Robin Williams movies, like Good Will Hunting. There are other Robin Williams speeches like the one about regret and Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. Heck, there are other Robin Williams stories, like the night he wandered into a bar in Stewart while filming Insomnia during a comedy night, patiently waited for the comics to finish their sets and then slayed the little northern B.C. town with his nuclear, manic humour for no other reason than he wanted to make people laugh.

But Dead Poets Society, which came to theatres 25 years ago this summer, seems to best encapsulate the whole spectrum of Robin Williams, a seriously funny man with funny and serious ideas. He didn't write Dead Poets, but his portrayal of Keating gave the movie at once a lightness and a sternness that just kept it from slipping completely into the sacchrine and the sentimental.

It's not just that he made dead words, dead poets seem new and fun, his Keating made them feel important. Here in B.C., we're grappling with issues surrounding teachers and education and how to prepare this generation of students for a world that's faster, harsher, where words and language seem to be luxuries and indulgences next to trades and sciences. One wonders what William's English teacher would have thought of the province's recent decision to remove essay questions from Grade 10 English and Grade 11 Social Studies in exchange for multiple choice answers; one hopes he would have condemned it as he did Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, PhD, with a single word: excrement.

"Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life," Keating tells his class. "But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

The movie is not a complex one - it's a story about free thinking, the tug of conformity and the strange urge of society to suppress dissidence and the uncomfortable (as Browning put it: "If there push'd any ragged thistle-stalk/Above its mates, the head was chopp'd; the bents/Were jealous else.") But the magic, the alchemy of the message comes from Williams, for what better person to lead a dionsysiac struggle against the quotidian than a man for whom original thinking wasn't a choice but a seemingly unconscious act of genius as effortless as picking up a pen?

Who better to ask "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;/Of the endlesss trains of the faithless-of cities fill'd with the foolish" and answer "That you are here-that life exists, and identity;/That the powerful play goes on and you will contribute a verse."

The powerful play does go on - and what a verse Robin Williams contributed.

It's hard not to watch the movie and see it through the lens of his death and its manner, to think about its entreaties to gather rosebuds, seize the day and not be resigned to a life of quiet desperation. To think of Tennyson, "We are not now that strength which in old days/Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are".

But perhaps the best line is when he tells a student: "You see poetry can come from anything with the stuff of revelation in it. Just don't let your poems be ordinary."

The stuff of revelation. He certainly was. "I am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable/I sound my barbaric YAWP over the rooftops of the world."