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When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Whitman uses his trademark eloquence and directness to portray the part of us that yearns for the spiritual connection to nature. His poem suggests that the dissection and study of nature – in this case astronomy – can remove its wonder, or in the case of Whitman’s sensitive character, make our bodies even shudder and rebel.

But most scientists, enthusiasts, educators, and school children would beg the opposite. Like opening the contents of a beautiful jewelery box, the keys that science provides us unlocks so much unseen splendor in the Universe. When we look up to the night sky, we can be filled with awe under a canopy of countless stars.  But the tools of our science has revealed that these pinpoints are a myriad of suns, almost impossibly distant, hosting a myriad of planets like our own. That truth is the source of an incredible awe, and fuels that part of our soul that desires a strong connection to the Universe.

I’d like to imagine what kind of poem Walt Whitman would have left us if he had heard a more inspiring lecture about the astonishing cosmos we live in. What words would’ve been compelled at the hands of an enthusiastic interpreter who took those “columns of numbers”, merged them with the “charts and diagrams” and formed them into images that touched his humanness? In that case, something tells me Whitman might have written so much more about the Universe. But then again, a look up to the starry skies \often does say more than a thousand words, or a thousand astronomers, ever could.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 6:05 pm and is filed under astronomy, poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.