Kera Bolonik eloquently unpacks Breaking Bad‘s nods to Walt Whitman. She describes a scene in which Walter White’s lab assistant, Gale, recites “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”:
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” is, among other things, a declaration of disillusionment with convention, and of liberation, of emerging from the passive seat and propelling oneself into the world to participate and engage with it:
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,…
How the poem applies to White:
Though Walt initially gets into meth cooking for what he thinks will be quick and easy money, he soon discovers that it gives him a second chance: not only as Jesse’s teacher, not only to redeem his legacy as a legendary chemist (if only in an illicit universe), but as a way of embracing life full throttle. The lessons of the “Learn’d Astronomer” apply to Walter White too. He has been a consummate underachiever, trying to impart in vain his vast wisdom on unappreciative, disrespectful students, including Jesse, whom he flunked out of high school chemistry years before.
The Walter White we first encounter in the pilot is a shell: hapless, mild-mannered, self-effacing, a public high school chemistry teacher struggling very hard to support his pregnant wife, Skyler, and his teenage son with cerebral palsy. It takes a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer just after his 50th birthday to breathe life into a man who’d been hiding behind “the charts and diagrams,” cleaving to his resignation. Getting a death sentence and subsequently turning to meth production (ostensibly, he first does it to build a nest egg for his family) thrusts Walter out of the “lecture-room” and into the “mystical moist night-air.” As he declares to an incredulous Jesse, who can’t believe that this is his former straight-and-narrow teacher: “I feel … awake.”
Mike Chasar has more.
The Dish 