Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, September 27, 2024.

Today's poem is a Walt Whitman classic,

When I heard The Learned Astronomer.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.

When I heard The Learned Astronomer.

When I heard the learned 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 wandered off by myself in the mystical moist night air,

and from time to time looked up in perfect silence at the stars. Boy, this is an apology for

poetry, if I ever heard one.

In my other life, my day job as a teacher, I sometimes taught rhetoric and informal logic.

And in both, we often have to talk about the straw man fallacy,

the act of creating an opponent that looks real but is hollow inside

resembles maybe your real life interlocutors but contains far less substance and is easier to

defeat the way you might practice jousting against a straw-filled dummy and really boost

your confidence that way. But it would be a far cry from entering a tournament against a

straw-filled dummy and carrying away at the trophy feeling like you really accomplished something.

Maybe Whitman is straw manning poor scholars and astronomers here,

but, you know, it's still kind of working for me.

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