Compare And Contrast

According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, the term compare and contrast means “to note what is similar and different about (two or more things)” The poem, Oh Captain My Captain!, the speech, Gettysburg Address, and the Funeral oration, Thucydides, Pericles’ Funeral Oration are three texts which share many similarities as well as differences. These three texts share many similarities such as the events that took place around the time they were created, which was war and their occasion which was that they all mourned the death of a fallen soldier. These three texts also had one main difference which was the way in which they achieved their goal.

Although some individuals might believe that 3 types of text written by different authors can

For instance, in the poem, Oh Captain My Captain, the author mourns the death of his “captain” He uses rhetorical devices such as repetition to describe the death of his captain as he says “But O heart! Heart! Heart!, O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen Cold and dead” (add citations) He also uses the captain and the battle as an allusion towards Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. These literary devices help establish the melancholic tone found in the poem. This melancholic tone can be found in The Gettysburg Address as well as Lincoln uses allusion to explain to his audience that the best way to remember the soldier who lost their life in the war is not by given them a piece of land but rather continuing to work on the goals of the soldiers who passed away. Pericles Funeral Oration also established this sorrowful tone as the speaker said that the best way to honor the dead is reminding the audience of what they died fighting for, athens. Because the main subject was the death of individuals, The primary audience for all three texts is also very similar as it is the families of those who died in the battle or they themselves played a role in the battle. For example, in Whitman’s poem the speaker himself was a soldier, in Lincoln’s

For example, the three texts all have different ways to achieve their goal. This can be seen as Pericles' Funeral Oration uses the death of the soldier as a way to gain more people who are willing to fight for the city of Athens. He achieves this by using an epideictic with a call to action in which he says “To honor the dead soldiers, and he wants to inspire the Athenians to keep fighting”(add citations) On the other hand, in the poem Oh Captain! My Captain!Whitman explains that while the Union was able to claim victory during battle it came at a high price, the death of Abraham Lincoln, an important leader and father figure. The Gettysburg Address also takes a different approach as it states that the lives lost in the Civil War were not just a fight to save the union but a fight for freedom and equality for