When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer - Walt Whitman

I seriously admire any man named Walt...they tend to spark emotions in me that just make me smile. This poem should be a poem that is read to every baby that walks out of the womb. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I remember learning in my Shakespeare class with Liebler, that our generation needs certainty. We need answers to everything. We need a cause for an effect. Without it we feel distressed and unsure of everything. But in this poem, Whitman is proving that wrong. Whitman is telling us that not everything needs reason, it just needs appreciation. Take for example a television (because I have mine on right now). You don't need to know how exactly everything inside it is wired, how it works, the calculations and diagrams, the science behind it...you don't need to know all that stuff to appreciate the fact that it works. Similarly with the night sky...who cares about all the calculations behind the planets and astronomy? You just need to know it looks pretty. Everything else takes away from its beauty and glamour.

What I like about this poem is that it doesn't have any structure. There's no rhyme scheme it has to follow, there's nothing really, except for the lines. Which goes further to prove Whitman's point. I don't see any of Whitman's poems having a very strict structure, which may be a way Whitman is trying to to prove his point.