I memorized this poem when I was in high school and illustrated it too. I don't have it by heart anymore, but it still echoes and resounds somehow.
My mom says she read Whitman to me when I was in her womb, which might actually explain a lot about my propensity for writing in free verse and my love for Hebraic repetition and restatement. Maybe I absorbed more Whitman that I consciously recall?
I don't really love reading his longer poems because I tend to lose track of what he's saying. Though that's not really unique to Whitman, in general I struggle with longer lyric poems. But sometimes he really does hit a sweet spot and has a marvelous turn of phrase.
And of course that final line, which "pulses with the irreducible mystery of those stars," is also such a satisfying conclusion because it is the only line in "perfect" (unmodulated) iambic pentameter.
I very much like the suggestion that the poem's two halves approximate the octave and sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet.
Yes, that last line resolves so satisfyingly --- after six lines of venturing out, sometimes far afield, from the first line as Keir describes it. He's never out of sight of traditional meter, at least in this poem, just casting his filaments like that noiseless patient spider, but finding his anchorage more or less where he began.
I often feel like it’s hard to write English, whether poetry or prose, and not fall into iambic stretches. But when it’s the first and last lines of the poem, as here, that’s probably not an accident. Song lyrics, which don’t need to be strictly metrical, will often use meter for emphasis, and that last line works like that here, it’s almost an emphatic statement.
The only quibble I have here --- although I think you can read that first line with three accented syllables (heard, learn'd, -stron-), and that's how I most naturally read it aloud --- is that if you read the first line as headless iambic pentameter, doesn't that then force you to stress the final syllable of "astronomer," as the second syllable in an iambic foot? You CAN, of course, but it feels forced to me, rather like Thomas Campion's "DEStinEE" example of meter gone wrong.
But yes, there's really no other way to read that final line than as iambic pentameter, and I do think that that's why it's such a satisfying resolution, asserting the real pulsebeat of verse in English.
No, you are not in the least forced to artificially emphasise that final syllable, Sally, and nor should you! If a beat lands on a naturally light syllable, it should remain so: it is perfectly metrical for a beat to be light, and the option of light beats only enhances the range of rhythmic variety and expressiveness.
Consider this line:
my BOUNty is as BOUNdless as the SEA
Juliet's heart is leaping. How perverse it would be, how counter to the emotional register, to weigh the line down by artificially emphasising the light beats on "is" & "as".
The flourish of an appended pyrrhic at the end of a line, as in Whitman's opening line, conveys a certain energy and can be wonderfully expressive.
In Shakespeare's opening sonnet, the opening quatrain concludes on an appended pyrrhic, and the first & last lines of the final quatrain end on an appended pyrrhic. If you read these lines naturally, and then reread them with artificial emphasis on those final beats, which reading best serves the expressive thrust of the sonnet? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50643/sonnet-1-from-fairest-creatures-we-desire-increase
I’ve sometimes felt there isn’t nearly as much difference between blank verse and free verse as we think, if you only read it silently to yourself. If you read it aloud, it should probably sound noticeably different, but then you have the problem of deciding just how each line should sound. And in this poem there’s a mix of metrical and unmetrical lines, a further complication.
An interesting exercise is to let the computer recite something in its slightly disembodied voice. Sometimes it messes up poetry if there’s no punctuation at the end of a line (like song lyrics), running lines together as though the line break isn’t even there (ie, like prose, meaning it doesn’t have a “poetry” mode). With this poem, my computer (Mac) speaks the first and last lines something like this:
When I HEARD the LEARN’D aSTROnomer,
LOOK’D up in PERfect SIlence at the stars.
I would say that’s not a terrible reading. And I like how both verbs are punched a little bit. Probably part of the speech algorithm, but it sounds okay, and the last line is without the sing-songiness of:
I can't say I find "deciding how each line should sound" in a passage of blank verse a problem. The meter informs me what range of readings is possible, and some metered lines can be read in more than way, which isn't a "problem" at all! And I may read the same line differently on different occasions, just on impulse.
I believe “learn’d” is normally read aloud as two syllables, so that would mean an anapestic substitution in the 4th foot. But it’s a smooth one, since the falling “ud” of its second syllable sets up the mouth for the quick opening “uh” of astronomer, meaning you can almost jam those two syllables together into one.
This guy’s pretty unenthusiastic sounding, but he’s definitely pronouncing two syllables:
It's an archaic pronunciation. The archaism is perhaps intended mockingly, or perhaps in imitation of Imogen in Cymbeline: "O, learn'd indeed were that astronomer / That knew the stars as I his characters".
Rhythmically, it's a perfect opener: while establishing the precedent of an opening stress on "When", it's coiled into a tight iambic meter before releasing into the final flourish of an appended pyrrhic (two light syllables at the end of the final word, resulting in a light final beat), paving the way for the progressive expansions of the next three lines.
That’s a good explanation! Mystery solved. And learn’d as one syllable does provide a decent rhyme with heard. Although it still sounds awkward to my ear.
Shakespeare used wander’d and look’d, but also rang’d, so at least he was consistent.
Mocking makes sense, although perhaps lost on most readers. But I like how he repeats “lecture” — he’s not even going to bother describing or use a synonym for that dry explication of facts, as we might put it. And then the night air is described as “moist.” Hilarious.
I wonder who the Poetry Foundation hired to read this poem. He sounds like he’s working through a thousand poems and just doesn’t care anymore.
Whitman always seemed sui generis to me until I read Isaiah a couple years ago. Then it clicked into place. Whitman = Emerson + Isaiah. Thanks for mentioning Jeremiah, I will check that out as well.
Yes, the constant restatement and parallelism is very much like Song of Moses, Ecclesiastes, etc. I haven’t looked at this, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Whitman is also sometimes just rephrasing things from the KJV. Just as Dylan occasionally did (“And the first one now will later be last”).
You’ve made an important point: these guys didn’t just come out of nowhere.
Through whatever flaw in myself, I simply can't enjoy Whitman. However, one thing that helped me appreciate his work anyway was when a professor pointed out that his "meter" is like the waves of the ocean (as the last line of your commentary suggests). If we all liked the same things, it would be a duller world, and I'm always glad to hear from those who like what I don't; a good reminder that beauty and excellence exist without my personal affection being needed.
I think what many readers have liked about Whitman is what Alice Allan in “The American Ecstatic” episode of her podcast called “the Whitmanian mode”: inclusive, democratic, etc. Or what might be called expansive: he embraces and loves all people, all animals, particularly birds, trees, plants, the stars, even death.
Even his windiness can be fun to hear out loud, as he has a great ear, and somehow gets away with things (too many adjectives, say) that other poets can’t get away with. “Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket, / Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.” That description of dead soldiers, and the sound of those adjectives, still gives me a shiver when read aloud.
His influences are vast. Carl Sandburg’s famous “Chicago” reads almost like a pastiche of Whitman (“Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil”). And on Allen Ginsberg. And perhaps even indirectly, via Ginsberg, on Bob Dylan at his most expansive (“Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight / An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night”).
I’ve always been a little confused by the -ed words in this poem, the ones that are contracted and the ones that are not: Learn’d (two syllables), wander’d and look’d (one syllable), ranged and lectured (not contracted).
The convention in English, it always seemed to me, was that if a word’s -ed ending was not to be pronounced as an extra syllable, then it could be contracted to make that clear (“And often is his gold complexion dimm’d”).
And that if you needed an extra syllable for the meter where -ed might not be a syllable, then accent the e to indicate this (“Of unimprovèd mettle hot and full”).
But what’s Whitman’s rule here? Am I overthinking this?
I'm not generally very gung ho about Whitman but this is really lovely! Happy to have encountered it so I cam finally be someone who enjoys (some) Whitman.
Our son G was driving out of Yosemite one night after a long day of good hiking with friends. His friend R in the front seat began yelling, "What is that?!" G was equally bewildered...what was R seeing? There was nothing but night ahead on the road. "That! Those things..the lights!" Still bewildered, G stopped the car and looked closely through the windshield. "You mean the stars?" R was dumbfounded. "No way. There're so many." They all got out, drank in the skyful of stars and had a good laugh. R was so much city-raised he'd never really seen the night sky.
That's amazing. Even in a small town, I'm aware of the light pollution --- I think I'm seeing a lot of stars when I walk the dog late at night, but I know I'm really not (and we live across the street from a community college where the lights are never off unless the whole town has had a power outage). But to think that you didn't even realize you were seeing stars!
I memorized this poem when I was in high school and illustrated it too. I don't have it by heart anymore, but it still echoes and resounds somehow.
My mom says she read Whitman to me when I was in her womb, which might actually explain a lot about my propensity for writing in free verse and my love for Hebraic repetition and restatement. Maybe I absorbed more Whitman that I consciously recall?
I don't really love reading his longer poems because I tend to lose track of what he's saying. Though that's not really unique to Whitman, in general I struggle with longer lyric poems. But sometimes he really does hit a sweet spot and has a marvelous turn of phrase.
And of course that final line, which "pulses with the irreducible mystery of those stars," is also such a satisfying conclusion because it is the only line in "perfect" (unmodulated) iambic pentameter.
I very much like the suggestion that the poem's two halves approximate the octave and sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet.
Yes, that last line resolves so satisfyingly --- after six lines of venturing out, sometimes far afield, from the first line as Keir describes it. He's never out of sight of traditional meter, at least in this poem, just casting his filaments like that noiseless patient spider, but finding his anchorage more or less where he began.
I often feel like it’s hard to write English, whether poetry or prose, and not fall into iambic stretches. But when it’s the first and last lines of the poem, as here, that’s probably not an accident. Song lyrics, which don’t need to be strictly metrical, will often use meter for emphasis, and that last line works like that here, it’s almost an emphatic statement.
I think you're right about all that.
The final line is "Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars". Which is indeed a perfect iambic pentameter.
The opening line is a perfect headless iambic pentameter! ("headless" = omits the opening offbeat)
The only quibble I have here --- although I think you can read that first line with three accented syllables (heard, learn'd, -stron-), and that's how I most naturally read it aloud --- is that if you read the first line as headless iambic pentameter, doesn't that then force you to stress the final syllable of "astronomer," as the second syllable in an iambic foot? You CAN, of course, but it feels forced to me, rather like Thomas Campion's "DEStinEE" example of meter gone wrong.
But yes, there's really no other way to read that final line than as iambic pentameter, and I do think that that's why it's such a satisfying resolution, asserting the real pulsebeat of verse in English.
No, you are not in the least forced to artificially emphasise that final syllable, Sally, and nor should you! If a beat lands on a naturally light syllable, it should remain so: it is perfectly metrical for a beat to be light, and the option of light beats only enhances the range of rhythmic variety and expressiveness.
Consider this line:
my BOUNty is as BOUNdless as the SEA
Juliet's heart is leaping. How perverse it would be, how counter to the emotional register, to weigh the line down by artificially emphasising the light beats on "is" & "as".
The flourish of an appended pyrrhic at the end of a line, as in Whitman's opening line, conveys a certain energy and can be wonderfully expressive.
In Shakespeare's opening sonnet, the opening quatrain concludes on an appended pyrrhic, and the first & last lines of the final quatrain end on an appended pyrrhic. If you read these lines naturally, and then reread them with artificial emphasis on those final beats, which reading best serves the expressive thrust of the sonnet? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50643/sonnet-1-from-fairest-creatures-we-desire-increase
I’ve sometimes felt there isn’t nearly as much difference between blank verse and free verse as we think, if you only read it silently to yourself. If you read it aloud, it should probably sound noticeably different, but then you have the problem of deciding just how each line should sound. And in this poem there’s a mix of metrical and unmetrical lines, a further complication.
An interesting exercise is to let the computer recite something in its slightly disembodied voice. Sometimes it messes up poetry if there’s no punctuation at the end of a line (like song lyrics), running lines together as though the line break isn’t even there (ie, like prose, meaning it doesn’t have a “poetry” mode). With this poem, my computer (Mac) speaks the first and last lines something like this:
When I HEARD the LEARN’D aSTROnomer,
LOOK’D up in PERfect SIlence at the stars.
I would say that’s not a terrible reading. And I like how both verbs are punched a little bit. Probably part of the speech algorithm, but it sounds okay, and the last line is without the sing-songiness of:
Look’d UP in PERfect SIlence AT the STARS.
I can't say I find "deciding how each line should sound" in a passage of blank verse a problem. The meter informs me what range of readings is possible, and some metered lines can be read in more than way, which isn't a "problem" at all! And I may read the same line differently on different occasions, just on impulse.
I believe “learn’d” is normally read aloud as two syllables, so that would mean an anapestic substitution in the 4th foot. But it’s a smooth one, since the falling “ud” of its second syllable sets up the mouth for the quick opening “uh” of astronomer, meaning you can almost jam those two syllables together into one.
This guy’s pretty unenthusiastic sounding, but he’s definitely pronouncing two syllables:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45479/when-i-heard-the-learnd-astronomer
Well, no, had Whitman intended a disyllabic pronunciation in this instance, he would not have used the apostrophe.
Right, that's what I would have thought. But it sounds so awkward that way, hence why it's normally recited with two syllables.
It's an archaic pronunciation. The archaism is perhaps intended mockingly, or perhaps in imitation of Imogen in Cymbeline: "O, learn'd indeed were that astronomer / That knew the stars as I his characters".
Rhythmically, it's a perfect opener: while establishing the precedent of an opening stress on "When", it's coiled into a tight iambic meter before releasing into the final flourish of an appended pyrrhic (two light syllables at the end of the final word, resulting in a light final beat), paving the way for the progressive expansions of the next three lines.
That’s a good explanation! Mystery solved. And learn’d as one syllable does provide a decent rhyme with heard. Although it still sounds awkward to my ear.
Shakespeare used wander’d and look’d, but also rang’d, so at least he was consistent.
Mocking makes sense, although perhaps lost on most readers. But I like how he repeats “lecture” — he’s not even going to bother describing or use a synonym for that dry explication of facts, as we might put it. And then the night air is described as “moist.” Hilarious.
I wonder who the Poetry Foundation hired to read this poem. He sounds like he’s working through a thousand poems and just doesn’t care anymore.
Whitman always seemed sui generis to me until I read Isaiah a couple years ago. Then it clicked into place. Whitman = Emerson + Isaiah. Thanks for mentioning Jeremiah, I will check that out as well.
Yes, the constant restatement and parallelism is very much like Song of Moses, Ecclesiastes, etc. I haven’t looked at this, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Whitman is also sometimes just rephrasing things from the KJV. Just as Dylan occasionally did (“And the first one now will later be last”).
You’ve made an important point: these guys didn’t just come out of nowhere.
Through whatever flaw in myself, I simply can't enjoy Whitman. However, one thing that helped me appreciate his work anyway was when a professor pointed out that his "meter" is like the waves of the ocean (as the last line of your commentary suggests). If we all liked the same things, it would be a duller world, and I'm always glad to hear from those who like what I don't; a good reminder that beauty and excellence exist without my personal affection being needed.
I think what many readers have liked about Whitman is what Alice Allan in “The American Ecstatic” episode of her podcast called “the Whitmanian mode”: inclusive, democratic, etc. Or what might be called expansive: he embraces and loves all people, all animals, particularly birds, trees, plants, the stars, even death.
Even his windiness can be fun to hear out loud, as he has a great ear, and somehow gets away with things (too many adjectives, say) that other poets can’t get away with. “Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket, / Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.” That description of dead soldiers, and the sound of those adjectives, still gives me a shiver when read aloud.
His influences are vast. Carl Sandburg’s famous “Chicago” reads almost like a pastiche of Whitman (“Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil”). And on Allen Ginsberg. And perhaps even indirectly, via Ginsberg, on Bob Dylan at his most expansive (“Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight / An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night”).
Sure, I understand all that. I still don't like his work. :) But I appreciate that others do, and I certainly affirm his position in the canon.
I’ve always been a little confused by the -ed words in this poem, the ones that are contracted and the ones that are not: Learn’d (two syllables), wander’d and look’d (one syllable), ranged and lectured (not contracted).
The convention in English, it always seemed to me, was that if a word’s -ed ending was not to be pronounced as an extra syllable, then it could be contracted to make that clear (“And often is his gold complexion dimm’d”).
And that if you needed an extra syllable for the meter where -ed might not be a syllable, then accent the e to indicate this (“Of unimprovèd mettle hot and full”).
But what’s Whitman’s rule here? Am I overthinking this?
"learn'd" is an archaic monosyllabic pronunciation: https://open.substack.com/pub/poemsancientandmodern/p/todays-poem-when-i-heard-the-learnd?r=9w4rx&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=117450701
I'm not generally very gung ho about Whitman but this is really lovely! Happy to have encountered it so I cam finally be someone who enjoys (some) Whitman.
I’m so happy to see you feature this poem. It’s one of my favorites.
Our son G was driving out of Yosemite one night after a long day of good hiking with friends. His friend R in the front seat began yelling, "What is that?!" G was equally bewildered...what was R seeing? There was nothing but night ahead on the road. "That! Those things..the lights!" Still bewildered, G stopped the car and looked closely through the windshield. "You mean the stars?" R was dumbfounded. "No way. There're so many." They all got out, drank in the skyful of stars and had a good laugh. R was so much city-raised he'd never really seen the night sky.
That's amazing. Even in a small town, I'm aware of the light pollution --- I think I'm seeing a lot of stars when I walk the dog late at night, but I know I'm really not (and we live across the street from a community college where the lights are never off unless the whole town has had a power outage). But to think that you didn't even realize you were seeing stars!