When I Heard The Learn D Astronomer By Walt Whitman

In schools, many students may face the challenge or struggle of wanting to explore a thought or lesson on their own. However, the majority of the time, they sit in a classroom listening to lectures and doing book-work rather than learning through their own ways. The poem "When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer" by Walt Whitman, tells a short story about how the author becomes very unhappy when it comes to Astronomy. In the poem, our narrator, Walt Whitman, acts as if he's bored from the lecture. Whitman sits down and listens to the astronomer as he goes and talks about the stars. Except he isn't talking about the stars. He's talking about equations and numbers and weird looking pictures that seem to have nothing to do with the stars. Whitman describes how everyone in the room started to applaud the astronomer for the amazing lecture he gave. Whitman however, became "sick and tired" of the teacher's lecture, he believed that the only way to learn about the subject was to go outside and see the stars by himself. In the poem, the narrator walks outside and sees the stars by himself and explains that no lecture can explain this feeling. Whitman main point is to try to show the difference between academic learning and experiential learning in schools.

He doesn't feel any connection towards the subject of what the astronomer is giving until he goes outside and sees the stars for himself, "When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick…" (Line 4-5). ). Whitman uses words like "glide" as a metaphor to symbolize the relief the narrator feels when leaving the lecture