THE SCENE from Dead Poets Society is immortal. Robin Williams as an English teacher reciting a poem by Walt Whitman, whose portrait hangs behind Williams.
“O Captain! My Captain!”
Whitman’s mother was Louise van Velsen. That’s where the family came from, from Velsen in North Holland. As did the man the poem was about, Abraham Lincoln. His roots were in the city of Hoorn. Earlier this week in 1865, on April 14, Lincoln was assassinated.
“O Captain! My Captain!”
Whitman wrote his lamentation for Lincoln. “My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still.” Just five days earlier, the rebellious South had surrendered to General Grant, scion of the De Lannooij family of Leiden: “Our fearful trip is done.”
“The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,” Whitman wrote, “but I, with mournful tread, walk the deck my captain lies, fallen cold and dead.”
Lincoln went out one night, to the theater, a comedy. The assassin waited for laughter from the audience, hoping no one would hear the gunshot. Everyone heard it.
It echoed around the world, up to and including today.
