Summary Of The Poem The Midnight By Billy Collins

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This poem is one of the most relatable poems I've ever read, even though it describes a passion that not all people share. It documents the thought process of the narrator as he begins an internship of some sort with an accomplished astronomer. He describes the work he does, how he is told to "add, divide, and measure" data that was collected about celestial objects. He becomes frustrated with this work, and during the astronomer's lecture, he goes outside to just look at the stars. A theme that I took away from this poem is that our passions can be discouraged if they are over-analyzed. The intern expected to fall more in love with his passion, the stars, when he applied to study with this astronomer, but then he is shoved into a corner with