I am now starting page 10 of the revision, yay. Interestingly, this process has not led to me shortening the paper like I had planned to. I started the process with an 11.5 page paper, and it has actually grown to about 12.75 pages. It's insane. To prove how insane, let me quote from the syllabus about this assignment:

"Your explication will probably be no shorter than five pages, probably no longer than ten..."

Yeah, so I've more than doubled the minimum length, and have gone beyond the suggested maximum. However, I am doing a close reading of a 77-line poem -- this would undoubtedly be a hell of a lot shorter if I was dealing with W.H. Auden's "Now the Leaves are Falling Fast," which is only 20 lines. But hey, at least I'm not trying to explicate the entirety of Eliot's "The Waste Land" or anything...

I think what really gets me about the length of this paper is that it just keeps going, completely unforced. Yes, writing it took effort, since I didn't want to think, but the fact is that this paper is not space-filling b.s. I mean, it's a close reading, so that's kind of a license for making stuff up, but this time it is grounded in my actual analysis of the poem and its subject matter. I'm not going off on weird tangents just to fill up space; I've actually got a good 9 pages of stuff to say about the poem (I've subtracted 1 page for telling the myth of Eros and Psyche, and another 2 for the poem itself, because I end up quoting all of it as I analyze it)... It's kind of weird.

Hopefully I'll this much to say about Ovid... You know, when I actually get to around to THAT paper...