When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer By Walt Whitman

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

By Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman is becoming one of my favorite poems, and this is my favorite one of his. “When  I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” describes someone, possibly Whitman, in a lecture given by an astronomer. The narrator then “gets tired and sick” and leaves and goes to stare at the stars. Whitman isn't just describing someone leaving a lecture, he is saying that sometimes it is better to leave things as a mystery, then to have them be explained as a something scientific and, in this case, as “charts and diagrams”.

Whitman describes the lecture as a place where “the proofs, the figures, were ranged, in columns”. I see that as the place where imagination died, creativity and the mystery of everything is sucked out and everything is explained. Whitman had the narrator “wandered off by myself” as a symbol for ignoring the facts. The narrator wanders off because he doesn't want to give in to the idea that space, the universe, the entire idea of existence to be explained. The narrator, and Whitman want to keep some mystery and creativity and imagination in their lives, and that  is why  he “looked up at the perfect silence of the stars” or looking up to a place where mystery and creativity and imagination flourish and continue to cultivate.

This poem uses the idea of an astronomer, a person who whole purpose is to study the 

stars and everything around it as metaphor for the answer to a question, but with what 

Whitman is saying, it's sometimes better to leave the question unanswered, than to have an 

answer because mystery is the best way to cultivate creativity and imagination.