4B+Raymond

Reply Poem to Emily Dickinson's //This is My Letter to the World//

This Is my Letter to You

This is my letter to you That never realized I always wrote--- The news that nature uttered was all true--- With a hoarse throat

Her words were all lost To support you ignorance--- For you--- left them--- in the frost--- Judge you freely; you have no innocence

media type="custom" key="24535046" Walt Whitman wrote //When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer// to express the necessary need to learn from nature, rather than learning from books and lectures. Whitman uses tone, word choice, mood, and line breaks to express his ideas. Whitman in the beginning used bland word choice and harsh pauses, to emphasis his "disgust" with the extremely structured educations. Whitman's word choice and tone changed as he continued. His tone changed because he changed the subject of the poem from learning from lectures and teachers to learning from nature and the stars, specifically. Whitman, also, used line breaks to emphasis his ideas. In the beginning, he broke the lines continuously, but towards the end the line breaks came farther apart and only broke when the thought was over. These continuous line breaks can be done to convey the idea of how tedious structured learning was to him. It could also represent how you will never get a real answer, or how the information is always changing. From nature you can learn and many questions can be answered if you take the time and look "up in perfect silence at the stars" (Line 11). The mood of the poem goes from a sense of knowing to a sense of uneasiness. However, with the mood at uneasiness, the tone seems uplifting. Whitman was more content with learning from nature and not knowing all the answer, than he would knowing all the answers from learning from a book or lecture. Whitman uses tone, word choice, mood, and line breaks to express his satisfactory from learning from nature.