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Ken Lewis

ENG 375

April 19, 2007

Meta-Analysis paper

            Analyzing the poem by Robert Frost called "Acquainted with the Night" was a little harder than I thought it would be due to the actual poem itself.  The way I usually analyze a piece is to break it down sentence by sentence and really think about what the words are saying.  I wanted to pick a poem that I thought would fit the task of the analysis process because I knew if I picked and easy poem, it would be just that- to easy.  Instead I picked a poem that I felt was more difficult to comprehend, not because of the writing but because of the symbolism.  This piece in particular had so much going on that it was hard for me to make one clear judgment about what he was actually trying to get across.

            The first thing I did was break down the poem into sentences.  I left open spaces on the paper so I would be able to write notes in the margins.  If I couldn't figure out what a sentence meant, I broke it up into easier language that I could understand and interpret.  An example was the line, "When far away an interrupted cry / Came over houses from another street."  In the context of the poem, this line threw me off so I decided to sit back and try to unpack the two lines and really engage them.  I changed the sentence to, "Then I cried for help, but no one was there to help me."  This actually made a huge change in the outcome of the poem because by my reading the first time through, I took it as a cry from someone else when really I do believe it was an internal cry out for help. 

            Free writing was another technique I used a lot in trying to unpack the poem.  I basically free wrote the entire poem in my own understanding, and then matched up the two poems to see the similarities and difference and to realize if the interpretation I had made sense to what the poem was really trying to say.

            It took me about forty five minutes to fully understand my own comprehension of the poem at hand.  This is a little longer than the normal time it takes me, but it is a poem that I feel was not difficult to read but rather difficult to understand.  There is a lot going on and I wanted to be able to get concrete images from it.  One of the most time consuming things I did was re-writing the poem in my own simpler words.  It wasn't frustrating for me because I don't really find examining poems frustrating.  I put my mind to the test when I do things like this and when I get a good outcome, I feel that it is all worth it in the end.  Once I was done reading the poem one or two times I sat back and tried to digest what I did know about the poem, then I went back and tried to identify what parts I was struggling with.

            The biggest thing that I learned about my analytic process throughout this examination is that when I try to comprehend something that is in difficult terms in my own words, it is much easier.  I don't believe that turning an extremely advanced work into something simple, with simple words is wrong and I don't feel that it makes me feel less smart.  If I can pull out of it a lot of concrete solid images with a basic or more advanced understanding through my analysis process then I feel I have succeeded.

            Overall I feel that this analysis of the poem has made me understand a lot more about my own interpretation of writing.  I think that in order to understanding anything, we as humans have to understand ourselves and in order to do that we need to engage in certain tasks and for English Majors, this Meta paper is a prime example.  Both papers have been a great experience and it helped me open up to constructive criticism from my peers and my self and in the long run I think it has helped me better myself in understanding future works in my college career.