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I've been very interested in the different reflections on reading "O Captain! My Captain!" here on the board.  I, like many people who have posted about the poem specifically, had not read the poem before class on Thursday. Many people have said that when it was revealed that the poem is about Lincoln that they were disappointed or felt that they were wrong for what they thought the poem was about upon their first reading.  The thing about this that interests me is that many people felt that they had to give up their interpretation of the poem once they were told what it was about, but isn't the point of poetry that it isn't explicit? It seems to me that Whitman must have written a poem in response to Lincoln's death for this reason, rather than just writing a speech or other prose, so that it could be able to honor Lincoln but also not be explicit about its subject. As we talked about in class in relation to Elizabeth Alexander's inauguration poem, many people thought that the reason her poem failed was because it was too explicit about its subject.  Shouldn't we be celebrating that we all had different initial interpretations of the poem and that those interpretations continue to be valuable even after we learn that the poem was written in honor of Lincoln? 

Our discussions about the nature of science have made me think about what I was taught in high school about how we can only ever prove things false but never to be true. So then the things that we take as "truth" in science are really just the closest approximation to the truth that we have come to. I just thought I'd throw that bit in to the mix as well!