When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

While the poem is about an astronomer who knows how to regulate even the immense night sky, the form of the poem evades strict regulation. The poem is written in free verse, meaning that it does not have a set meter or rhyme scheme. The free-flowing structure of the poem helps to reinforce the contrast between the disciplined, orderly approach the astronomer takes to his subject in his lecture and the more fluid, emotional, and uninhibited experience the speaker wishes to have with nature—and which Whitman himself aligns with by maintaining the free verse form.

Whitman sets up his poem upon a single, run-on “delayed sentence” – a sentence that withholds its main point until the last possible moment, creating a sense of suspense for the reader. The first four lines of the poem start with the word “When”, building up the image of the astronomer, his lecture, the public hall, and the audience—it is only in Line 5 that the reader is finally told anything at all about what the speaker is feeling (“tired and sick”). The poem closes by describing the speaker’s solitary walk out in nature, still building up the scene until the final line, where the reader finally receives the emotional punch line: the speaker is left staring at