Saturday, August 6, 2011

"When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" Poetry Help?

The "learn'd astronomer" symbolizes the logical, deductive, scientific way of confronting the world. We organize, analyze, and measure, hoping that all of our efforts will bring us some understanding of this mysterious thing that we call the world. However, the narrator is not sated by such an approach, he becomes "tired and sick" instead. He rises silently, in other words places himself beyond the realm of confusion ruled by words and symbolic concepts, which are not the thing — lived reality — itself, but merely fabrications that distance us from it, and glides, which itself connotes effortlessness, out into the night air, which is "mystical," in contradistinction to the all-too-analytical atmosphere of the lecture hall, and partakes of the night-air's "moistness," once again balanced against the "aridity" of the abstruse scientific lecture taking place inside the lecture hall, a space created by man for an artificial process of learning. Out in the night-air, in the land beyond the layer of confusion created by words, a man-made product, silence is "perfect." This is a poem about moving beyond the modern ethos and reconnecting with what is holy and natural in the world, finding transcendence through immersion in it.

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