When_I_Heard_the_Learnd_Astronomer

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” Response I was enamored by the beauty of our galaxy as I saw a variety of captured pictures of our galaxy from the video, Astronomical Grace. The previous studies on stars, Milky Way, and black hole never hinted that I was ever going to be interested in the astronomy. All the lectures Mrs. Webb brought me nothing but groans and yawns. They were just another package of things I needed to cram in my head for the chapter test on astronomy. Stars lives seemed so complicated and hard to memorize. Concerned about all these different types of things I needed to memorize, I was blinded by the actual beauty, mystery, and power of God’s wonderful creation, our galaxy. By reading Walt Whitman’s poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”, I felt that I could concur with the narrator. The narrator tells us how “tired and sick” (line 5) the narrator became as he “heard the learn’d astronomer” (line 1) lecture. The cold, hard facts of taught through proofs, figures, charts, and diagrams, bored the narrator (lines 2-3). I can also see that the students hearing the same lecture as the narrator were bored, because they were “lectured with much applause” (line 4). This shows that most students were not fascinated by the lecture. Whitman’s use of parallelism in the first stanza, by starting every line with the word “when”, conveys that Whitman is trying to accentuate the fact that the lecture was very structured and not creative. By making each line in the first stanza longer than the previous lines, Whitman also seems to imply that as the lecture went on, the hours seemed to go slower and slower. Nevertheless, when the narrator “wander’d off” (line 6) alone into the “mystical moist night air” (line 7), “from time to time” (line 7) the narrator looked up at the stars. The fact that the narrator kept looking back at the stars “in perfect silence” (line 8) shows that the narrator was awestruck by how amazing the stars in the sky were compared to what he had heard during the lecture. As I have mentioned earlier, I could relate to this poem to the time when I learned about the stars and saw the pictures of them in our galaxy. However, I think that I can relate this poem in a figurative way, too. For example, hearing the amazing testimonies, although usually not as boring as lectures, give me a glimpse of how great God’s love is. But this does not measure up the greatness of God’s love from when I myself am abounded by His amazing love and grace. I enjoyed this poem, because I could agree with the poem’s message that actually experiencing things are much better than hearing facts about them and because I could relate to it in various ways.