When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer

The Learned Astronomer

Just recently I found a poem that I feel really fits into the conversation about expressing art through showing people things rather than telling them.  In this poem a student sits in on a lecturer’s lesson about astronomy and gets bored and inattentive.  But then, something great happens.  As he leaves the lecture hall and comes out of the building in the dead of night, he looks up and sees the stars.  He marvels at them and gains a deeper understanding of what the stars really are than the students in the hall listening to what the lecturer has to say.

This is the poem:

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.

BY Walt Whitman

This, I think, is a great example of what we as filmmakers should be striving for.  To get our audience to understand something that they may not have understood before, because to truly understand something one needs more than a definition, one needs to experience it for themselves.  So as Christians we should have the audience experience an unfailing love, an ultimate sacrifice, and mystery so that even without them knowing it they understand Jesus better than what they had before.  This is the amazing thing about film and animation and things because just like the student who could bear listen to the lecturer’s blabber, people have a hard time understanding the human emotion and what better way for them to experience and understand them fully than through media.