Whatever you think about the poetry of Walt Whitman (1819–1892), indisputably he does go on. As our poetry editor has noted before, it’s hard to choose a Whitman poem for the Sun’s Poem of the Day, simply because so many of them are so long. Of course, Whitman is not alone in this. Many nineteenth-century poets did go on. Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” and “Evangeline,” for example, are not haiku.

There’s nothing minimalist about those poems. And in their day, people read them. They were popular literature for an entire culture of readers with attention spans. Given the state of our own literary culture, where it’s hard for a poet to place a poem of more than forty lines in a magazine, or for a short-fiction writer to publish a story longer than four thousand words, the nineteenth-century popular tolerance for writing that goes on may be hard for us to imagine. 

Yet even in the context of that nineteenth-century reading and writing culture, Whitman is different. Unlike Longfellow’s popular narrative poems, with their cast-iron meter, which needed room to tell their stories, Whitman’s poems need room for their form to exert itself. That form’s chief principle, like that of the Hebrew poetry of the Bible, is repetition and restatement. As a previous Whitman Poem of the Day, “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” demonstrates, he was not  inattentive to the metrical conventions of English verse.

Still, as a general rule, his lines generate their poetic rhythm, urgency, and cohesion not through regular patterns of meter, but via patterns of repetition and the breaking of those patterns. The more room the poetic voice has to go on repeating itself, the more transcendent momentum it builds as it goes. Ultimately, whatever it happens to be talking about, that voice attains prophetic proportions, like the Prophet Jeremiah set down in the Middle Atlantic states and given a mandate to talk not about the misfortunes of Israel but about himself.  

Sometimes, though, this formal principle works in a short poem. “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” begins with four lines in these prophetic cadences, each repeating and rearranging the same basic idea: I went to a lecture, and it turned the miracle of the stars into a math lesson. Yet somehow, because of that insistent reiteration and rearrangement, those opening lines accrue an urgency that no summary can quite communicate.

Remarkably, for a poem consisting of a single octet, this repetitive four-line beginning, piling up its catalog of “proofs” and “figures,” “charts and diagrams” and algorithms, does exactly what the octet of a Petrarchan sonnet does. It establishes a problem — I went to this lecture thinking it would be interesting and it wasn’t — which, like a sonnet’s sestet, its final four lines resolve.

Again, it’s all too easy to reach for the reductive summary with its cheap laugh. Saith the prophet, “I don’t like math. I do like stars.” And yet, like any effective poem, this one lands on something impossible to summarize. Is it profound? Not if you try to sum it up. Yet the last line, the place where the poem’s waves of repetitive intensity cast it ashore, pulses with the irreducible mystery of those stars.   

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
by Walt Whitman

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.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.