Question

in" when I learn'd Astronomer,' the speaker prefers gazing at stars over heaing a lecture about astronomy ?

Answer 1

I think it might be more accurate to say that the narrator, in that moment, needed more than facts and figures to satisfy his soul.

Explanation:

I believe we're working with Walt Whitman's "When I heard the Learned Astronomer" (I've grabbed the text from https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/when-i-heard-learned-astronomer):

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.

I think we can figure out what Whitman is saying without getting into his other works, his history, etc.

First we need to see that our narrator went to hear a lecture on astronomy. That person would have known beforehand that there would be facts and figures and diagrams and all the rest of it.

So what happens? S/He sits through the entire lecture, through to the end, when the audience applauses the lecturer's efforts. But for our narrator, the lecture isn't enough - it isn't enough to capture the mathematics and physics of stars and planets and all that - there is something so much more - the beauty, the mystery, the sheer scale of a vast overarching sky filled with brilliant motes of light.

And so our narrator wanders off away from the centre of learning and to the centre of experience - outside - to witness for her/himself, to experience first-hand the wonder of the night sky.

And so to the question - does our narrator prefer gazing at the stars over hearing a lecture? I can't say that the answer is yes. If it were yes, I don't think we would have seen the narrator attend the lecture - there would have been something in there that would let us know that lectures are for other people.

I think the answer is more nuanced than that - the narrator had had his mind fed with information and then went and fed his heart with beauty and nature. And so I think it might be more accurate to say that the narrator, in that moment, needed more than facts and figures to satisfy his soul.

And now to the most important part of this answer - what do you think? I've given my opinion and like all good poetry, it asks us to think and form our own thoughts and opinions on things. So the most important part is not my thoughts, but yours.