Analyses of The Egg Had Frozen, an Accident. I Thought of My Life

The Egg Had Frozen, an Accident.
I Thought of My Life

The egg had frozen, an accident.
I thought of my life.
I heated the butter anyhow.
The shell peeled easily,
inside it looked
both translucent and boiled.
I moved it around in the pan.
It melted, the whites
first clearing to liquid,
then turning solid
and white again like good laundry.
The yolk kept its yolk shape.
Not fried, not scrambled,
in the end it was cooked.
With pepper and salt, I ate it.
My life that resembled it ate it.
It tasted like any other wrecked thing,
eggish and tender, a banquet.

When given the chance to choose your favorite out of a selection of items, it doesn't mean that the item chosen 
is special or impressive at all. In fact, it simply means that you like it more than the other choices presented to
 you. Jane Hirshfield's The Egg Had Frozen, an Accident. I Thought of My Life was just one of seven topics that I 
have been given the chance to write about. After reading all of the poems presented to me for this week I came
to realize that I disliked every one of them. But, out of every one of them it was The Egg Had Frozen, an
 Accident. I Thought of My Life that caught my attention more then the others. So in a way Hirshfield's 
poem was my favorite of this week, but by no means would it be a poem that I would recommend to others.


Jane Hirshfield's blatant attempts at conveying her meaning by stating it only shows that she is ill equipped at 
using the English language as way of creating a metaphorical representation of her lack luster life. In her defense
if she had not stated that she "thought of my life" then I would have had no idea what the poem was meant to
represent. So the incredibly amateur technique of spoon feeding the reader into understanding the overlying 
themes of your poems was in fact the only way that the reader would be able to understand the poem at all. 
In the basic sense, she forced everyone to seem dumber than they most likely are in order to gain the mental 
advantage and save us from our confusion by aiding us in finding meaning in The Egg Had Frozen, an 
Accident. I Thought of My Life.


Now that I have expressed my true feelings about this poem I can know do an honest analyses of Hirshfield's 
poem. The poem begins in the same way as life, with an egg. An egg that has been frozen in time and won't
change anymore until it is exposed to the world. The simile that she uses comparing the white of the egg to 
laundry is not only an expression of her role as a typical woman in today's society. Towards the end she 
writes about how her life is nothing special at all. Her egg wasn't scrambled or fried, scrambled being the 
exciting and random life while the fried egg is the neat and tidy life where everything is in its proper place. 
In fact she goes onto say that her life was like any other wrecked thing, for it was as if her whole life she had 
been trapped in the frying pan with no means of escape. She was thrown into the pan with a little bit of butter 
so that she would have the ability to escape but never made it out. The line that stuck out the most to me was
 "My life that resembled it ate it", and how bad it is. There is no enjambment to save this line from the crime of
throwing out the book of basic sentence structure. I feel that she attempted to convey an extremly deep 
emotional idea but unfortunatly her attempt ended in failure. This is the only sentance in the entire poem that 
makes literaly no sense to me. She attempts to say the she ate the thing that represents her, but in a way doesn't 
that show an even deeper meaning into what her life is like. If so then everything we have been told to believe 
represents her life has to be deeply reinterpreted thanks to this line. Therefore in order for one to understand this 
poem it must be read a minimum of two times in a row because its the only way to understand her overly complex
writing. Even if it ruins the poem on the first read the fact that one is forced to reexamine the entire poem is the 
most intriguing thing about this poem, if it were not for this I would have never had shared this poem with those 
reading. The only thing that this poem has is staying power, you want to read it one more time so that you can 
understand her ramblings. After that the poem is put into the bottom shelf of your mind, where it will never be read
again.