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When one reads Margaret Atwood's poetry, that which stands out most prominently is her intensely personal style of narration. Her style is both inviting and revealing which aides in creating an intimate relationship with the reader. This narration allows Atwood to befriend and beguile readers with her use of easy, everyday speech and soothing story-like themes while also enabling her to tackle larger and more pressing social issues. As an ardent feminist, the technical aspects of Atwood's poetry reflect her concerns for matters such as equality for women and the need to challenge social norms. Most concretely, these concerns are voiced through her usage of style, tone, punctuation and word choice. The three poems that I will be analyzing, This Is a Photograph of Me, They Eat Out, and from Circe/Mud Poems Men With the Heads of Eagles each focus on this theme of feminism and achieve their goals through the employment of Atwood's graceful and calming tone.
Yet, by guiding the reader gently and not didactically, Atwood subtly introduces her concerns without the noise and clamor oft associated with her cause. Atwood's easy-going, colloquial tone is perhaps best exemplified by her titles. Her titles, This Is a Photograph of Me, They Eat Out, and from Circe/Mud Poems Men With the Heads of Eagles, all aspire to create a friendly relationship with the reader. In the case of the title of This is a Photograph of me, Atwood manages to combine emotions of self-indulgence, pride, and optimism with the naivet of a young child to create an audience that is spellbound by the precociousness of this child.
The very capitalization of the word is underscores Atwood's efforts to create this type of relationship. By capitalizing is, Atwood makes what seems to be a grammatical mistake, a mistake one might expect from the writings of a precocious youth. Likewise, the title, They Eat Out, seeks to produce the warm and inviting atmosphere of a friendly dinner. While the phrase eat out seems harsh and caustic, Atwood uses this terminology because of its colloquial value. By using this phrase, Atwood mimics the language patterns of friends and family seeking a quick meal, and thereby creates a similarly warm and caring environment. With her title, Men With the Heads of Eagles Atwood endeavors to amuse and interest her reader.
By amusing her reader, Atwood fashions a relationship built on interesting and inquisitive nature of entertainment. To make her relationship with the reader all the more genuine, Atwood employs the rhythms of everyday speech instead of a highly structured and restrictive meter. In Men With the Heads of Eagles the reader follows the narrator on her quest to find an acceptable man. Here, Atwood guides her readers through the masses of undesirable men in order to find one that interests her. As early as the first sentence, Atwood's rhythm makes the reader feel as if they have a personal connection with the narrator, Men with the heads of eagles no longer interest me or pig-men, or those who can fly with the aid of wax and feathers or those who take off their clothes to reveal other clothes or those with skins of blue leather or those golden and flat as a coat of arms or those with claws, the stuffed ones with glass eyes; or those hierarchic as greaves and steam engines. (pg. 1546 - 1547) Here we see that Atwood's rhythm is quick and not interrupted by any unnecessary pauses. Atwood uses this swift rhythm to persuade the reader of the confidence and truth of the narrator.
Simply stated the comprehensiveness and swiftness with which this laundry list is recalled forces a reader to believe that this is not the first time the narrator has voiced these complaints. The plight of the narrator has become a cause of nightly angst and seemingly endless frustration. Yet these personal and very private complaints are voiced to the unacquainted reader. In hearing these complaints the reader becomes transformed from a detached observer and instead assumes the role of a good friend, who by their listening, now commiserates with the narrator.
By achieving the confidence of the closeness of a friend through her prose, Atwood gets the reader emotionally involved in the poem. In the readers eyes this is no longer poetry, rather it is the nightly diatribe of a friend who is exhausted by the quest for finding a worthy and interesting man. Punctuation also serves as an extremely important part of creating an atmosphere conducive to Atwood's oftentimes-light poetry. In her poem This is a Photograph of Me, Atwood presents the reader with the beautiful and innocuous image of a lake and countryside only to debase this symbol of beauty and tranquility with the startling and humorous revelation that the narrator is not actually in the picture, rather her body is submerged, having drowned in the lake a day earlier. While the beginning of the poem is stated in a straightforward manner, the crux of the poem, the narrators death is not.
The final four stanzas of the poem those in which the death is revealed and discussed are enclosed with parentheses, (The photograph was taken the day after I drowned. I am in the lake, in the center of the picture, just under the surface. It is difficult to say where precisely, or to say how large or small I am: the effect of the water on light is a distortion but if you look long enough, eventually you will be able to see me. ) (pg. 1545 - 1546) These parentheses indicate that the four stanzas that address the narrators death were included as an afterthought. Suggesting that the narrators death was a late addition to the poem underscores the poems friendly sarcasm. Likewise, Atwood's frequent usage of commas and short sentences accentuates the humor of her message.
Much like in the telling of a joke, the commas and pauses increase the readers anticipation of the punch-line. In Atwood's poems, humor serves the purpose of achieving a closeness, which prepares the reader up for the underlying message. Behind the humor lies a resonance of seriousness that challenges the readers already established notions of the times. In They Eat Out, Atwood's commitment to the feminist movement is made evident in her reversal of roles. Ostensibly They Eat Out is a poem that depicts the fantastic and violent daydreams of the narrator as she and her date argue about who will pay the bill.
Yet, instead of offering a collected diatribe on her view of ever-evolving social norms, she presents a well-veiled, sometimes ambiguous account of her challenges to the status quo. In order to achieve this, Atwood juxtaposes contemporary thinking with old-fashioned thinking through her word choices, I raise the magic fork / over the plate of beef fried rice/ and plunge it into your heart. (lines 7 - 9) The phrase magic fork used as a weapon conjures up an image of a trident, a large three-pronged weapon carried by gods in mythology. Thus, this mythological man carrying the trident represents the man and ruler of the past. Yet in this account, the woman uses the gods weapon against him, leading one to believe that she has usurped his power. The woman then is confronted with the reality that a new fantastic figure (Superman) has replaced him, You hang suspended above the city/ in blue tights and a red cape (lines 16 - 17). The usage of this allusion to Superman is intended to provide some levity and distract the reader from the severity of her message.
Yet it is only at the conclusion of the poem where we see that the fruits of this trident wielding has produced a bittersweet result, As for me, I continue eating; / I liked you better the way you were, / but you always were ambitious. (lines 23 - 25) Here Atwood's employment of the ambiguously-gendered pronoun you leaves the reader questioning whether the narrator is disappointed in the changes in herself or the changes in her male counterpart. Word choice also plays a vital role in the development of Atwood's poem This Is a Photograph of Me. While the poem is superficially concerned with the humorous revelation that the narrator in the picture is dead and not even clearly depicted, upon closer inspection it can be ascertained that Atwood intended that it deal with the drowning out of womans voices. By having the narrator speak after her passing, Atwood establishes her premise female voices cannot be drowned out. As such, in the very beginning of the second stanza the narrator extends an invitation to the reader (you) to scan the picture as she does, to listen to the voice that cannot be silenced, It was taken some time ago. At first it seems to be a smeared print: blurred lines and grey flecks blended with the paper; then, as you scan it, you see in the left-hand corner a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree (balsam or spruce) emerging and, to the right, halfway up what ought to be a gentle slope, a small frame house. (Lines 1 - 12) Yet this invitation the narrator offers us is one we cannot refused is a guided tour that Margaret Atwood has already begun.
The urgency of the tour is conveyed through the imperative phrase as you scan it and obliges its reader to follow. However, this decisiveness is not off-putting, rather it is as necessary and irresistible as hot chocolate on a winters day. Soon after the invitation is offered, the reader is presented with a choice, balsam or spruce and then soon after, an image of domesticity, the small frame house. The choice here does not involve a type of tree; rather it deals with the acceptance or rejection of the drowning out of womens voices. The choice, as Atwood sees it, is both necessary and important in a time when womens roles were constantly being redefined in the home and workplace. During a time of great and extreme social upheaval Margaret Atwood served as an understated voice of change.
While she remained firmly entrenched in feminist ideology, she offered fence-straddlers and extremists alike a warm invitation to explore feminism through her delicate and refined poetry. Her poetry's smooth story-like quality and subtle nuances in style all have an enormous impact on its readers. Moreover, Atwood's poetry, with its seemingly lighthearted themes drives its reader to strive for more than a superficial understanding of her works. Her understated technical skill constantly challenges her reader to actively uncover her intended meaning. Yet none of that could have been achieved without Atwood's narrator gaining the trust and confidence of the reader. Ultimately by befriending her reader with a combination of personal style of narration, warm tone, meaningful punctuation, and excellent word choice, Atwood is able to create a relationship of investigation with a reader in which they continually examine and reexamine her poetry in search of deeper meanings.
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Research essay sample on Personal Narration Effects Her Readers
