How Does The Speaker Of â€å“when I Heard The Learn'd Astronomerã¢â‚¬â Prefer To Learn About Nature?
"To soothe and spiritualize, and, every bit far every bit may be, solve the mysteries of death and genius, consider them under the stars at midnight," Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) wrote in his daybook upon receiving word of another cracking poet's death. "Is there not something nigh the moon, some relation or reminder, which no poem or literature has yet caught?" he wondered as he approached the end of his own life.
Equally a young man, Whitman had written in the preface to his Leaves of Grass, which forever changed the soul and sinew of poetry:
The sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes… but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to impaired existent objects… they wait him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.
No literary artist has wrested grander themes out of the reality of the natural world, nor channeled those themes more beautifully, than Whitman, for whom astronomy was a particularly fallacious lens on humanity's intimacy with nature. He lived through a gold age of American astronomy, when the beginning university observatories were being erected, when comet discoveries and eclipse observations regularly made the front pages of the nation's newspapers. Later astronomers at the U.South. Naval Observatory discovered the showtime moon of Mars, and soon the second, Whitman exulted in his notebook: "Mars walks the heavens lord-paramount now; all through this calendar month I go out after supper and lookout man for him; sometimes getting up at midnight to accept another look at his unparallel'd lustre."
But equally much every bit Whitman relished the discoveries of astronomy, the undiscovered cosmos called to him with even greater allure and he called back with uncommon divination. More than than a century before the kickoff confirmed detection of an exoplanet, this poetic seer peered far out into "the orbs and the systems of orbs." One-half a century before Edwin Hubble glimpsed Andromeda, upending humanity's millennia-old conviction that ours is the only galaxy in the universe, Whitman envisioned that "those stellar systems… suggestive and limitless as they are, merely edge more than limitless, far more than suggestive systems." A century before scientists theorized a multiverse, he bellowed from the invigorating pages of Vocal of Myself: "Allow your soul stand cool and composed before a one thousand thousand universes."
And nevertheless as much as the triumphs of science thrilled him, as ecstatically as he sailed along the ever-expanding shorelines of cognition into the vast expanse of the knowable, Whitman fixed his gaze on the horizon of the known, aware that past it lay an oceanic immensity infinitely vaster. A century before Carl Sagan insisted that "the universe will always be much richer than our power to understand it," Whitman revolted against the hubris of finality and celebrated what science does non nonetheless know, and perhaps might never know, in his poem "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," published in 1855 and brought to life in a stunning reading by astrophysicist and poetic science author Janna Levin at the opening of the third annual Universe in Verse, benefiting the endeavor to build New York City's first-ever public observatory at Pioneer Works — a dream many times dreamt since the founding of the city, many times attempted, and many times failed, including an effort in the eye of the 19th century advertised in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, in which Whitman made his name.
WHEN I HEARD THE Learn'D ASTRONOMER
by Walt WhitmanWhen I heard the larn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add together, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How presently unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rise 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.
Complement with John Cameron Mitchell reading Whitman'due south ode to the unfathomed universe below the surface of the ocean and Janna Levin reading Maya Angelou'southward cosmic clarion call to humanity at the second annual Universe in Verse, then join me in supporting Pioneer Works and making this long-dreamt observatory dream a reality.
For more wonder and splendor at the intersection of poesy and science, savor Regina Spektor reading "Theories of Everything" by the astronomer, poet, and tragic genius Rebecca Elson, Amanda Palmer reading "Hubble Photographs" past Adrienne Rich, and James Gleick reading Elizabeth Bishop's poignant poem most the nature of noesis.
How Does The Speaker Of â€å"when I Heard The Learn'd Astronomerã¢â‚¬â Prefer To Learn About Nature?,
Source: https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/05/31/astrophysicist-janna-levin-reads-when-i-heard-the-learnd-astronomer-walt-whitman/
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