When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

Walter Whitman, 1865

 

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.

 

“I repeated it quietly, pacing around the room, while my little brother worked addition problems. I supposed I was quiet, and I supposed the poem dull and incomprehensible to a five year old, but, when I paused for a breath, he 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…’

“My brother nodded sympathetically.

“‘He had to add, divide, and measure everything. Finally, he was so sick and tired, he just got up and left and went outside to look quietly at the stars.’

“My brother sighed, relieved and thoughtful.

“‘Sometimes,’ I continued, surrendering once more to my pedagogic tendencies, ‘we should stop talkking about beautiful things, and just enjoy them.’

“‘Yeah,’ he agreed.

“Chastened, I returned to my recitation, and he to his sums.”

—”Why He Ran Away.” Cabbages and Kings. January 2011.