Analysing poetry

I had to work on my methodological paper about conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and poetry, which is why I haven’t written here for a bit longer than I hope to do. However, it is done! The deadline is this Monday, which means that I’m way before schedule. I’m not handing it in yet. I want to re-read it so that I can minimise (spelling) mistakes. I analysed the first stanza of a poem by Sylvia Plath. This being a linguistics paper, the focus was not any literary theory, but on the methods of testing and/or applying the cognitive linguistic CMT. Doing this had the fortunate side effect of me appreciating the poem even more.

 
Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper
 
No novice
In those elaborate rituals
Which allay the malice of knotted table and crooked chair,
The new woman in the ward
Wears purple, steps carefully
Among her secret combinations of eggshells
And breakable hummingbirds,
Footing sallow as a mouse
Between the cabbage-roses
Which are slowly opening their furred petals
To devour and drag her down
Into the carpet’s design.
 
With bird-quick eye cocked askew
She can see in the nick of time
How perilous needles grain the floorboards
And outwit their brambled plan;
Now through her ambushed air,
Adazzle with bright shards
Of broken glass,
She edges with wary breath,
Fending off jag and tooth,
Until, turning sideways,
She lifts one webbed foot after the other
Into the still, sultry weather
Of the patients’ dining room.
 
Next to spending time on my own paper I invested some efforts into helping Fransy and Jelena. Fransy had problems finding out what she wanted to write her metaphor paper about and we discussed this problem for an extended period of time. She wanted to do something with metaphors of desire and love songs. However, since she is not methodologically strong and much better at empirical research (counting ‘stuff’, such as prepositions) we decided that it would be better to analyse something using a methodological framework that had already been set in place. This is exactly opposed to what I did, where there was nothing and the purpose of the paper was to develop this method. Now Fransy is doing an analysis of metaphor in celebrity stories found on the internet. We set up the various sections that she would be writing and it seems that she is now well under way. I got a couple of phone calls about applying MIP and deciding whether a word is a metaphor or not. Reunite is not a metaphor; in the docks when referring to someone on trial is. Of the expression in the docks the question then arises as to which of these three words is a metaphor. Docks would be, in might be and the is not.
 
Jelena had problems with her BA thesis. I couple of weeks ago I had to help her with statistical testing, but that should’ve been enough. We had expected it to be. However, when she handed it in the supervisor found it wasn’t sufficient. Helping Jelena with her paper was not possible for me anymore, since, obviously, she is far better invested in the topic. Providing moral support and explaining graduation procedures is something that I could help with. She handed it in today and will her if she has passed later this evening. If she hasn’t then she has to work on it some more and apply for an extension in order to be allowed to begin the MA in September.
 
We three are meeting tomorrow to discuss and hang out. The year is coming to an end, but we don’t want to lose contact just yet.