Close Reading Reflection

I honestly enjoyed doing this close reading assignment. It definitely made me understand the poem more and the theme of the poem as well. When I was re-writing the poem in my own words, it made me realize how hard it was to actually do that. It was a struggle for me to compare the author's words in the poem to something in my head. Until the word or phrase came to my head, it was hard for me to conjure up what the author was actually saying. I couldn't just make words or phrases up in my head because then that would defeat the purpose of the assignment and change the meaning of the poem too. That was probably one of the hardest things to do for this assignment.

When it came to part b of the assignment, I chose the section "Vocabulary and Diction", particularly the question, "Which words do you notice first? Why? What is noteworthy about this diction?" I wanted to chose this question particularly because I'm not familiar with diction, so I thought I should test it out. I picked out words that I thought had meaning to the poem overall or words which confused me and I did not understand. This was an easy task but it definitely made me think more about the poem and what it represented. For example, in line 10, the author refers to a child. Picking this word out made me realize that the author's poem was referring to a child all along which I didn't know when I read the poem the first time. Re-reading the poem two times made me become aware of what and who the author was actually talking to and talking about. This exercise made it easier for me to understand the whole idea of the poem and to actually make my thoughts flow more clearly. I thought it was a good lesson overall.