AN ANALYSIS OF EXPERIENTIAL MEANINGS IN CARL SANDBURG’S POEMS

Finding out the meaning of a poem is one aspect that is often the main objective of reading a poem. This thesis discusses how to interpret poetry by using the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) which Michael Halliday popularized to find out the meaning and transitivity process in poetry written by Carl Sandburg. The selected poems are A Million Young Workmen and Masses, both poems discuss social issues in it. Using descriptive statistical methods to see the spread of data obtained from the transitivity analysis process and descriptive qualitative methods to find the meaning of the two selected poems. The results in this thesis found that a total of twenty-three clauses consisting of 15 clauses from A Million Young Workmen and 8 clauses from the Masses.The findings show that P1 contains a material process (52.63%), mental process (15.79%), verbal process (5.26%), behavioral process (5.26%), and relational process (21.05%). P2 contains a material process (33.33%), mental process (50%), and relational process (16.67%). Proportional to the frequent material process, the most dominating participants in P1 are Actors and Goals with a percentage (17.86%). Meanwhile, in P2, Senser has the percentage (12.5%), and Phenomenon with the percentage (25%). In the Transitivity of Circumstances, P1 and P2 have circumstance location as the most dominant Circumstance of P1 (53.85%) and P2 (66.67%). The result showed that the hallmark of Sandburg's poetry is the use of Circumstance of Location. In addition, by using the data obtained above, the inequality faced by the poor in P1 is indicated by the different values in material and relational Processes carried by the ruling and working class. Whereas in P2, mental Processes play an essential role in our way of appreciating something. Keywords: Systemic Functional Linguistics, Transitivity, Experiential Meaning, Carl Sandbur