TEXTUAL ANALYSIS – “When I heard the learn’d astronomer”

“When I heard the learn’d astronomer” is a poem written by Walt Withman whose topic is the first person narrator’s impression hearing an astronomy lesson. The reader can understand this reading the title: indeed there are the first person’s pronoun “I” and the verb “hear” which is a feeling verb. Moreover the title is a not-completed sentence, and its function is to create suspense.

The poem is organized in one stanza of free-verse, and it’s built on a repetitive structure.  Sure enough the reader can notice the anaphora of the word “when” in the first four lines. The function is to create suspense, as the title, and a climax of anxiety, because the first person narrator doesn’t say what happened to him immediately.

The repetitive structure underlines moreover the verb’s passive form and the semantic field of scientific language. The two elements focus the attention on the first person’s impressions: indeed he is hearing the lesson without his will, so he feels so bored looking at the quantity of scientific data. Moreover, the alliteration of the sounds “d”, “rd, “nd” and “ct” underlines the lesson’s heaviness one more time. So the first person narrator becomes tired and sick, and the chiasm of sounds “c” and “s” at line five emphasizes this idea (“how soon unaccountable I became tired and sick”).

So the first person narrator goes out quickly and looks at the stars. At the lines seven and eight there are the alliteration of the sounds “m” and “s”, which result mild sounds. So this alliteration contrast with the previous one, of the heavy sounds, and underlines the difference between the lecture’s lesson’s futility and the stars beauty.

So the poem is divided into two parts: the first has the function to create a climax of tension and suspense, and the second is a liberation of the universe’s beauty.

I believe that the poet wants to give to the reader two message: the first is that not all is understandable by human’s reason and by futility data, but there’s some of beautiful that must be looked as a beautiful thing, and the second is that a person must sometimes separate himself by the crowd to experience the life and see the world by a different personal prospective.