Why He Ran Away
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in
the lecture room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.1
I repeated it quietly, pacing around the room, while Littlest Brother worked addition problems. I supposed I was quiet, and I supposed the poem dull and incomprehensible to a five-year-old; but Littlest Brother, when I paused for a breath, asked with quiet urgency,”Why did he run away?”
I laughed with delighted surprise, and he smiled at me gravely and expectantly. How had he understood that an escape had been made? How we persist in underestimating children!
“Well, he was at school, and he was learning about stars,” I explained, “but the teacher talked and talked and showed him numbers and more numbers and charts and diagrams, and he had to add...”
Littlest Brother nodded sympathetically.
“He had to add, divide, and measure everything. Finally he was so sick and tired, he has just got up and left and went outside to look quietly at the stars.”
Littlest Brother sighed, relieved and thoughtful.
“Sometimes,” I continued, surrendering once more to my pedagogic tendencies, “we should stop talking about beautiful things and just enjoy them.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
Chastened, I returned to my recitation, and he to his sums.
1 “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” Walter Whitman. Leaves of Grass, 1900.
COMMENT ON THIS POST BY SENDING AN EMAIL TO THE HANDMAIDEN.
HANDMAIDEN said...
I am hardly the first to have noticed how quickly some children understand and identify with this poem Loren Long has illustrated it for children, and, though I haven’t looked at it yet, it seems promising. The dust-jacket reads: “Toy rocket in hand, the boy finds himself in a crowded, stuffy lecture hall. At first he amazed by the charts and the figures. But when he finds himself overwhelmed by the pontification of an academic, he retreats to the great outdoors and does something as universal as the stars themselves... dream.”
Friday, January 28, 2011 03:16 PM
Friday, January 28, 2011