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Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronome
When I heard the learn'd astronomer
Walt whitman the stars
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Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” is a poem that illustrates a boring moment in the narrator’s life. The speaker is listening to a famous and renowned astronomer speak about everything but the stars. He, the speaker, politely listens as the astronomer continues with his lecture on equations and numbers. We can assume that the narrator is feeling a type of disappointment when he starts to feel a sense of sickness. Some of the themes that Walt Whitman uses in describing his poem for one would be dissatisfaction. Another theme Whitman uses is isolation he self imposes on the narrator.
Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself and Alice Fulton’s You Can’t Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain
Walden, by Henry David Thoreau is written in first person about the events and ideas that came to the author during his time living at Walden Pond in the eighteen hundreds. Henry David Thoreau was a poet and a philosopher who lived a life of simplicity in order to make a direct connection between people, God, and nature. He viewed knowledge as an "intuitive force rather than a set of learned, logical proofs." His writing in Walden focused on many different themes, including the relationship between light and dark, the ideas and importance of nature, the meaning of progress, the importance of detail, and the relationship between the mind and body. He also developed many philisophical ideas concerning knowing yourself, living simply and deliberately, and seeking truth.
A cold stare, and a hand on his hip, is how Walt Whitman introduced himself to his readers in 1855. The style of Whitman’s frontispiece was uncommon for its time, a man with a loose collar and a worn hat would have been found more commonly on a farm than adorning a literary scholar in the mid-nineteenth century. Whitman wanted to show that he was no better than anyone who would read his poetry. Whitman conveyed himself to his audience by showing himself as an everyday workingman; his wrinkled shirt shows that he is use to working hard for everything that he has. The stare he gives back to his audience looks as if he is examining the reader the same way they may be examining him or his work.
Walt Whitman poem is about the marvel of astronomy. He wanted to learn about the stars. He went and heard an astronomer. He tells, “When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me.” All the data about astronomy was laid out in front of him, but this did not captivate his interest or filled his curiosity. It mad things worst. His plan to see the beauty in the stars was turned to boredom and sitting in a tiresome, lackluster lecture. He writes, “How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick.” The lecture, data, and astronomer were not the beauty he wanted to see. The visual experience is what he wanted to see. The silence and view of the stars was better for him than the lecture and data. The beauty is what he really wanted. He did not want the hard facts.
The Heath Anthology of American Literature repeatedly refers to Walt Whitman and his poetry in terms of being American, yet as I read Song of Myself, my thoughts are continually drawn to the philosophies and religions of the Far East. Like the Tao Te Ching ideas are expressed in enigmatic verse and each stanza is a Zen koan waiting to be meditated on and puzzled out. Even Emerson called Whitman's poetry "a remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Gita and the New York Herald" ("The Whitman Project"). Song of Myself contains multitudes of passages that express Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist thought.
Throughout the poem, there is repetition of the line “I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there, ” to emphasize his empathy. He also includes alliteration such as “rent roofs” and powerful imagery like “the long roil of the drummers” to liven the poem. Additionally, he helps the reader experience the events in the poem by using similes to compare the challenges to things that the reader has experienced. One line reads, “The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck”. In the poem, Whitman becomes the heroes, but by incorporating the literary devices, Whitman allows the reader to experience the same experience as the heroes as
With words and phrases like “isolated” (“Noiseless” 2) and “vacant vast surrounding” (“Noiseless” 3), Whitman retains dark and hopeless tone. The words that define the tone are mainly describing how hopeless human’s soul can be. This is based on the analysis of the humans, which is based on individualism, the cornerstone of transcendentalism. On the other hand, in “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” Whitman keeps his casual tone, just like he is discussing his anecdote. This tone is the opposite of the one used during the Age of Reason, when the justifications and logics were prevailing. As the transcendentalism sought separation from European heritage, the works at that time period were casual and from sudden inspiration. “Astronomer” definitely shows how the writings demonstrate the sudden change in writing form—an important aspect of
*Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 3rd ed. Ed, Paul Lauter. Boston,NewYork: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Lindfors, Berndt. "Whitman's 'When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer.'" Walt Whitman Review 10 (1964): 19-21.
Poems are used to convey a strong message to the audience and reader. These poems conveyed the theme of sorrowness and death. An example of sorrowness in Walt Whitmans “O Captain! My Captain” is “Where on the deck my Captain lies / fallen cold and dead”(7-8), which means that the president is laying fallen and dead after the homecoming of the ship. An example of sorrowness in W.H. Auden’s “Elegy for JFK” is.“When a just man dies / lamentation and praise / sorrow and joy are one”(13-15). This quote is saying that when the president, John F. Kennedy, died there was sorrowness as well as joy and praise. The poems “Elegy for JFK” and “O Captain! My Captain!” conveyed the theme of sorrow by using figurative language such as metaphors, rhyming, and over exaggeration.
As Whitman, the specific individual, melts away into the abstract, “Song of Myself” explores the possibilities for communion between individuals. Whitman addresses the reader in a particularly direct manner. He integrates his reader into the poem, and is freed of the constraints of poetic principle and social etiquette. The poem presents entire body lounging on the ground, leaning and idling. Whitman deliberately conflates natural world and poetical world. “Song of Myself” goes beyond the boundaries of Transcendentalism in the relationship of the physical and spiritual, individual and universal. The self that Whitman cheerily sings and celebrates substantiates a ‘uniform hieroglyphic’: suggestive, multiform, and awash with inconsistency. “It is as much a physical presence as a projected spiritual possibility” (Jason 2). Even as it blatantly and fervently expresses Whitman’s faith in evolution (and therefore in the necessary indivisibility of self-reliance), “Song of Myself” also conveys a separation with the “self,” the poet himself, and the co...
In this poem, Whitman describes a scene in which he leaves a lecture out of pure boredom and disappointment at the value of receiving a lecture. By the end of the poem, Whitman describes looking up at the stars, which the astronomer or professor, was “teaching” about, and learning more in that moment than he had the rest of the night. To conclude these thoughts he ends with the line, “Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” (432) Walt’s main point through this piece is that experiences teach much more than the recitation of words or the examination of data could ever teach. This idea probably directly stems from his lack of formal education. Whitman was a strong believer in the individual as well; he believed that an individual teaching themselves through experience was more valuable than any school. Like Scott Trudell said, this piece, “…highlights the stress between the self-referential and even contained method of science, and the intuition and romantic knowledge of the individual.” (Trudell) Once again, this poem highlights Whitman’s radical ideas that challenged all preexisting education
The major theme in the poem ‘When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer’, by Walt Whitman, is experience. The point the author is trying to get across is that it is much better to learn out of experience rather than having lectures. This poem implies that learning and having experience is more insightful than learning through graphs, lectures and charts. In the line “When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them…” the speaker is saying that we think that we’re learning from all the equations and formulas, but in fact we’re just frolicking with the objects in nature inside a confined world. In this poem the author expresses his belief that we can only gain knowledge about nature through experience.
Whitman's Poem "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking," is not, at first glance, an obvious love poem. Most readers would probably consider this a tragic poem about death and love lost. In spite of the fact that the poem is about intrinsically sorrowful events, or perhaps because of it, Whitman is able to capture a very unique and poignant portrayal of love. There are three major perspectives to examine how Whitman develops the theme of love in Out of the Cradle, and by examining each reoccurring theme in the poem separately, we can come to a more complete understanding of how they work together to communicate Whitman's message about love.
The Ode to West Wind Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" is a lyric poem. The poem addresses the west wind as the powerful force and the speaker asks the west wind to disseminate his words and thoughts throughout the world. The speaker narrates the vicissitude of nature and how the west wind changes the ground, the sky and the ocean. With rich imagination, which is the reflection of Shelley's "defence of Poetry," the poet modifies the west wind, being both a destroyer and a preserver, as a symbol of revolution, an impetus of the rejuvenation of both human and natural world.