During the 1800s, Walt Whitman established himself as an accomplished poet.

One
of his exceptional poems was “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” written in
1865 and published in the Leaves of Grass. The poem is a description of a lecture
given by an astronomer, which the listener finds uninteresting and quite boring.
Other members of the audience however found the facts and figures quite
revealing, and applauded the astronomer. The listener proceeds to leave the room
silently, taking refuge in the beautiful of the moist night. He looks at the stars with
his naked eye and appreciates there magnificence and wonder.

Whitman’s poem is eight lines, and usually would not be considered a sonnet.
Regular sonnets have a rhyme scheme, but this poem does not have the rhyme
scheme characterized by a sonnet. Sonnet ends with a couplet, a pair of lines that
rhyme and share the same idea. Whitman’s poem does not end with a couplet, nor
does it have a rhyme scheme. These reasons led the reader to believe Whitman’s
poem is not a sonnet, yet we can appreciate it as though it were a sonnet.

A poem may become a sonnet through its content, as sonnets are usually love
poems. In this poem, Whitman is expressing his passion for the beauty and
mystique of the night sky. The listener stands and removes himself from the room
because the science of the astronomer was ruining his love for nature, through
defining and measuring its values. The listener needs to see the splendor of stars
by himself, unaided and distorted by scientific or mathematical calculations. He
looks up in perfect silence at the stars to think about them and reflect. Unlike the
astronomer, he cannot use math to assign numbers, logic, figures, tables or charts
to understand and describe the stars. The listener is pleading with the reader; do
not use astronomy to comprehend the nature of space, instead use your feelings
and imagination to appreciate the brilliance and magic of the stars and space.

The last two lines of a sonnet are known as the couplet, two lines which rhyme and
have similar ideas. The purpose of the last two lines is to sum up the entire poem
or to give the main idea of the poem. This poem does not have a rhyming couplet
but the last two lines do sum up the value or lesson of the poem. Whitman initially
directs the poem towards the astronomer, the significance of empirical data and
how astronomy defines its observations. Than, Whitman changes the tone, his
listener is overwhelmingly bored and anxious to leave the lecture. In his last two
lines he reveals the true purpose of the poem.

Often sonnets are considered revelations of the sonneteer’s personal feelings.

Whitman’s poem is a sonnet because it expresses his own feelings, towards the
stars and astronomy. Throughout the poem Whitman did not disagree with or
object to the findings of the learned astronomer, he found the lecture was
“unaccountable [and] I became tired”. Whitman did not phrase it “unaccountably”
because the listener did understand what the astronomer was lecturing about.