This post is one of three related to the second assignment for 427. To complete the assignment you need to respond to at least one of these reflective posts.
The cluster of issues you can write about in response to this post:
How did you go about deciding how best to frame your analysis? What challenges did you encounter in trying to figure out the angle of approach for explaining your text? What lingering uncertainties do you have about what you were supposed to do in this part of the assignment?
Deadline: Wednesday (2/18), 10am.
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I chose to analyze "An Elegy", by an unknown author, whose date of publication was estimated at 1790.
It was pretty apparent to me upon reading this poem that it had to do with death, being as it was called "an Elegy" and speaks of "the dictates of the dead." Naturally, I began by looking at how it ties into what we've studied thus far on that topic of death, primarily Leapor's "Epistle to Artimesia" and Thomas Gray's "Elegy". After noting that both of these poems view death as a great equalizer and look at life as a fairly futile process once death is considered as an inevitable end to that life, I had to acknowledge that this poem I chose treats the topic quite differently, for it looks at life through the eyes of the dead, rather than looking at death through the eyes of the living. While the poem still recognizes the inevitability of a death to end all life forms, it does not take the typical next step of proclaiming life as futile or purposeless in light of that inevitability. Rather, it accepts that inevitability and looks at how we can enrich what life we have and, what's more, ensure the continuation of a spiritual life after that impending death.
As Professor Wilcox indicated in earlier lessons, the poem was fairly straightforward once I unraveled the grammar and defined some of the obscure words. I had to get past words like "bier", meaning "grave", and "sable" meaning "black, as a symbol of mourning." In addition to that, one of the proper nouns in the poem was "***", which confused me greatly until Professor Wilcox informed me that, in later C18 British poetry, this typically was the poet's way of referring to the subject of the poem, and the number of asterisks corresponded to the number of letters in that person's name. In this case, however, "Maria" appears to be the subject of the poem, for she is the deceased whose story poses a lesson to the living. But "Maria," as you most likely will notice in much the same way I noticed, has five letters, not three. Nevertheless, I figure it refers to her, or it could possibly refer to deceased people in general, since the fact of the matter is that they are all dead and it is used as a way of asking the reader how much more fortunate they believe themselves to be than "***" was, who is now dead, thereby making the point that no matter who they compare themselves to, no matter how lucky they believe they will become, they will nevertheless come to an end some day.
The poem also seemed to advocate the salvation of the soul by turning to God and abandoning folly and sinful habits of the mortal world. This confused me a little bit, since very little of what we've read so far has preached Christian messages. Still, the poem ends with the lines, "Make then, while yet ye may, your God your Friend / And learn with equal ease to sleep or die!" and I could only interpret that in one way: the poet pleads with the reader to turn to God and save their soul, thereby making death into a process of no more consequence than sleep.
I framed my analysis around the general theme of our independent unit class discussion for next Monday. I had already read many critical texts in preparation for that project and the inspiration for my argument drew from those texts, in thinking about the ways Britain's Empire developed its identity.
The biggest challenge was discerning which words to capitalize, italicize, or otherwise draw emphasis to, and which words to leave alone. I tried to bring out the main point of my argument by capitalizing and italicizing certain key words, which may have been too editorially liberal.
On a broad sense, I was extremely uncertain about my freedoms as an editor of this text. The average C21 reader might not notice, or even care about, a certain capitalization here or an italic there, but placed incorrectly, these choices can dramatically alter the meaning of the poem. Like I said, my choices emphasized points that aligned with my argument in a subtle, almost unnoticeable way.
To digress, the power of minute changes made me think about the Bible and its different translations. Some translations are geared toward different purposes, using different words to convey different levels of 'translational correctness,' and yet these differences often cause rifts between believers of the same basic faith. Having this kind of power is slightly scary to me.
I chose to analyze "The Advertiser. A Poem." written in 1775 by either an anonymous author or an unknown one.
I had quite a bit of trouble deciding how to analyze my poem. Though it was very obvious what the subject matter was, I found that it was so obvious that I almost had nothing insightful to say on the subject. I ended up deciding to discuss how the subject and the date in which it was written indicate that revolution was not far from becoming a reality, however, in retrospect, I may have discussed too many things other than the actual content of the poem itself.
I also attempted to bring in some comparison with poems we read in class to my analysis and when all else failed, I simply talked about my favorite part of the poem.
I would have to say that I didnt have a hard time analyzing my text. I found a 30 line section that connected the set up with the over all meaning of the poem well. However to be honest I would have to say that I was not sure what you were hoping for me to pay attention to. I talked about the poems meaning and how it both agreed and went against enlitenment writing and romaticism at the same time.
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