Meta-Reading Paper

For this meta-analysis paper, I will take Sheridan Blau’s advice to his students embarking on this same meta-analysis mission: “I now emphasize the experimental nature of the study they are undertaking and invite them to do it in the spirit of play—which is to say, with all the seriousness of attention that children devote to their best moments in play, and with the same freedom to improvise and experiment that children feel because nothing is really at stake” (169). Like a child before a swimming pool on the first day of summer vacation, I now will jump in to the assigned poem. I read the title first, “The Panther,” and immediately an image of a prowling black panther with bright eyes jumps into my mind. With it comes a connotation of excitement. On a lower level of my mind, I think of why I associate panthers with excitement, perhaps because they are purely wild, a thought that trails away as I begin to read the first line. The first words are “His vision,” and the black panther’s eyes are the focus of my mind’s eye. Next I read “from the constantly passing bars,” and now the image in my mind changes from what was a vague, dark wild setting to the panther in a cage at a zoo. The panther is still prowling back and forth in the cage, and now I feel sympathy for him. I read from the beginning: “His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else.” I can’t help but to read the full sentence now, because although there is a line break between the second and third line, there is no punctuation, and I have been trained to read poetry aloud in sentences. I am thinking, “His vision is growing weary from gazing out at the outside of his cage; this speaker, it is in third person, but deep third—he knows what the panther feels. The speaker is sympathizing with the panther?” I sympathize with the panther. I am also thinking—and I would note that I am developing a sense of how many different levels I think at simultaneously—about the panther’s vision “holding” whatever it is seeing. I am thinking about the gaze; the gaze is from inside the cage, looking out. I associate thoughts about “the gaze” with women’s studies and the male dominated gaze throughout the history of writing. Does this association have any meaning here? On a lower level, the level that I am not engaging right now, my mind is ranting about the injustice of zoos and keeping animals in cages and the superiority we humans assume we have over all other living things. I read the next sentence: “It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.” The image in my mind is from the panther’s gaze now, looking out but seeing lines and lines of bars, forever. I am wondering if the panther is a metaphor for something else kept in a cage, or if this is a poem about cruelty toward animals. I am eager to read on now, and I read the second stanza in full. I imagine the panther prowling in circles and I have an African association with the words “ritual dance.” I am confused over the last line, what is in the center? I re-read the second stanza, slowly. The scene moves in slow motion in my mind as I read. “A mighty will stands paralyzed:” First, I understand the panther’s bravery, integrity, freedom to be the center which he is circling around, but which he can’t reach in the cramped cage, either physically or because of the mental imprisonment there. Then I imagine that “mighty will” to take on a form: an African chief, with a serious, determined face, frozen in time. I move on the last stanza. I read the first sentence: “Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly.” To understand that, I think I must read on: “An image enters in, rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone.” I feel confusion and panic for the panther. I feel like the speed of the poem suddenly quickened. I decide to back up and read the entire poem from the beginning. Reading the entire poem, I confirm that the speed definitely does quicken toward the end of the poem. The images of the first two stanzas are concrete in my mind now. I interpret the first line of the last stanza as a memory hitting the panther’s mind: “Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly.” It is a painful memory that “plunges” into the panther’s heart. This is an effective description of painful memories, a feeling that is hard to put into words. But in this context, it is understandable. Other than making me want to protest the caging of wild animals, it is easy to empathize with the panther in this poem. It is effective imagery to describe how a person feels when they are trapped or caged in, in some less-literal sense. Overall it is sad, almost painful to read for me. Rilke must know the tendency of people to sympathize with animals more than they do with humans. I notice now that it is translated from another language. To me, this means that the content of the poem is much more important than the sound devices, sentence structure, or even diction, because words sound different and have different denotations in other languages. The meaning of the poem is clear, and I like it, though it makes me sad and angry at humans. In analyzing how I read, I noticed how significant my feelings are to an interpretation of a text. The ability of words to change how I feel about whatever is being described is incredible. Also, I noticed the process of coming to a meaning of the poem. When I am paying attention to it, I realize how many-leveled my thinking is. The most conscious, engaged part of my mind, the one I hear reading the poem in my head, is on one track, while below it there are less conscious tracks making connections. In this way, I form theories about what this poem may be communicating as I read it. I realize also how quickly and vividly imagery forms in my mind as I read. This is something I have never though about directly, but it doesn’t surprise me. I have always had trouble discerning between my imagination and my real life. I used to have night terrors when I was little, and I still frequently confuse my dreams with reality. The imagery and depth of my imagination is what allows me to read for hours and completely forget where I am. I don’t think I could understand a text without forming a mental image of the scene in my mind. This is very interesting to realize how I read, and I wonder if other people read in similar ways. I intentionally did not apply any of the reading strategies when I read the poem, because I didn’t want to be distracted by teaching methods and not learn how I usually read. I think I would prefer my students to do the same, at first, without reading strategies for guidance. After reading their meta-analyses, I would suggest reading strategies that might make their reading easier or more comprehendible for them. I think this really depends on how the student is reading at first, though. For myself, I already use many of these reading strategies. In my reading of “The Panther” I used “Annotating A Text,” “Key Concept Synthesis,” and “Listening to Voice,” at least. For myself, I would suggest the “Dense Questioning” reading strategy and the “Collaborative Annotation” reading strategy. I believe building on your natural sense of inference and understanding with simple methods that work is most helpful for students. But first, just as I did with “The Panther,” students should realize their own natural reading habits. _________________________________________________________________ More photos, more messages, more storage—get 2GB with Windows Live Hotmail. http://imagine-windowslive.com/hotmail/?locale=en-us&ocid=TXT_TAGHM_migration_HM_mini_2G_0507