3B+Yusko

media type="file" key="IMG_2736.MOV" width="300" height="300" Astronomer’s Response to Whitman

Those who have eyes that cannot catch sight of, Foolish who find mere integers immeasurable, Sheep, impaired to comprehend cavernous statistics, And Instead, their vision glazes over at the first visibility of light,

While learning has stalemated, and those have been mislead, while they are encouraged to defy the logic and thought of those before them, while settling for basic level thinking, while they will never truly flourish until they ask why.  Cooper Yusko

Analysis

The poet Walt Whitman shows his deep transcendentalist thought in his poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” Whitman uses stylistic features such as repetition, anaphora, and tone to contribute to the overall theme of the piece, which is dissatisfaction. The author commences the poem by repeating the title, which already sets a sarcastic tone to the poem. This sarcasm is conveyed through the use of the contraction in “Learn’d” because it is the opposite to what the refined astronomer is trying to convey to his listeners, which is sophistication. He has not gained any knowledge from this seminar, and he leaves because of his irritation. He uses anaphora, which is the repetition of a word or phrase in the beginning of successive clauses, in lines 1-4. This repetition of the word “When I” projects an overwhelming feeling of apathy while he is sitting at the seminar. He sees charts and figures arranged in columns, and it seems it has nothing to do with astronomy in his mind, which in turn bores him. Whitman is trying to make the reader comprehend the apathy he felt with his use of the anaphora, which connects to his unhappiness. Lastly, the tone difference between the first seven lines compared to the last four lines displays his continuous theme throughout the poem. The astronomer is putting the mysteries of space into mathematical terms, by having “the proofs, the figures,-- ranged in columns” (Line 2, Whitman). These words would bore any reader, and Whitman wants this to happen since he drastically changes his tone once he walks out of the seminar. He finally realizes that he needs to get first hand knowledge of these experiences in space, so he ‘wanders’ outside in the “mystical moist night air” (Line 10, Whitman). This conveys his theme of dissatisfaction of the astronomer and the way he is trying to display astronomy.