Point of View

“Casabianca” is in written from an omniscient third-person perspective. Considering the chaos, confusion, and lack of clear knowledge regarding the circumstances of Giocante and his father’s demise, Hemans’s speaker in the poem demonstrates her possession of vast imaginative powers in spinning an epic account of the boy’s unanswered cries to his father. The unnamed narrator’s detailed account of Giocante’s bravery in his final moments suggests the power poetry and storytelling have for imagining a clarifying alternate reality to the confused events of reality. However, “Casabianca” also suggests the limitations of an omniscient, third person narrator’s fictional alternative realities. There is a moment when she literally seems to lose sight of Giocante and what will happen to him during the poem despite it being her own account of the events, evident especially when, near the end, she suddenly exclaims “The...