The Snake
Traditionally a symbol of sexuality and wisdom, the figure
of the snake pervades much of Atwood’s work. In the section of Interlunar dedicated
exclusively to variations on the appearance of the snake, Atwood
offers a bold reason for this recurring interest: “O snake,” she
says in the first line of “Psalm to Snake,” “you are an argument /
for poetry.” To Atwood, this slithering beast symbolizes the unseen forces
driving the universe. According to the poem “Bad Mouth,” a snake
is also “fanged,” carnivorous, and prone to “gorge on blood,” characteristics
much in keeping with the violent worldview presented in much of
Atwood’s poetry.
In “Eating Snake,” the speaker rejects the common comparison of
the snake to the phallus (insisting on “two differences: / snake tastes
like chicken, and who ever credited the prick with wisdom?”). In
“She,” the poet dismisses the easy analogies (a whip, a rope, the phallus)
and describes the snake as a far more complicated creature “with
nothing in it but blood.” Atwood uses the masculine pronoun to describe
this bloodthirsty creature, admitting in the last line that she
does so out of habit. The poem ends with the line “It could be she,”
suggesting that women are equally capable of predatory behavior.
For a poet obsessed with the individual’s capacity for self-concealment,
the snake’s “gradual shedding”—its regular trading of one skin for
another—offers an exceptionally rich metaphor for human transformations,
undertaken for survival or amusement.
The Moon
Of the many symbols Atwood takes from the natural world,
the moon is among the most malleable. Traditionally invoked as a female
goddess, the moon offers a vehicle for Atwood’s interest in darkness
and the brief illuminations that interrupt it. In her poetry, the
moon can symbolize totality, mystery, menace, and oblivion. In “You
Begin,” from Selected Poems II: 1976–1986,
a child’s mouth is compared to “an O or the moon.” In “A Red Shirt,”
from Two-Headed Poems, she describes the male desire
for woman to be “bloodless / as a moon on water.” In “Night Poem,”
also from Two-Headed Poems, the moon becomes a
“beige moon damp as a mushroom.” In “Mushrooms,” from True
Stories, Atwood echoes this image in her description of
mushrooms as “poisonous moons, pale yellow.” In the title poem from
this collection, the ever-elusive nature of “truth” can only be
approximated in list form, as “a moon, crumpled papers, a coin.”
In “Landcrab I,” she speaks of “that dance / you do for the moon.”
The moon sees all but never comments. It is the silent,
inscrutable, and probably an indifferent observer of the human comedy unfolding
below. Atwood emphasizes this point in “Landcrab II,” in which the
subject identifies itself as a “category, a noun / in a language
not human, / infra-red in moonlight / a tidal wave in air.” In “Last
Day,” Atwood writes, “Everything / leans into the pulpy moon,” suggesting
the tug of this “pulpy,” murky object just beyond human reach. To
Atwood, the moon symbolizes several layers of contradictions, the
spirit of multiplicity and ambiguity that animates all her poetry.
It is visible but mysterious, massive but ephemeral, cyclical but
unpredictable. As she puts it in “Sunset II”: “Now there’s a moon,
/ an irony.” The moon can be anything the viewer decides it is,
as in “Against Still Life,” when an “orange in the middle of the
table” is transformed into, among other items, “an orange moon.”
The moon is the proof of human subjectivity, “the reason for poetry.”
The Female Body
The female body represents servitude and entrapment, victimization
and imprisonment—otherness as defined by a men. It is a battlefield
of violence, as in the section “Torture” from “Notes Towards A Poem
That Can Never Be Written,” from True Stories,in which
the speaker describes a woman’s body as a “mute symbol” of grotesque
weakness: “they sewed her face / shut, closed her mouth / to the
size of a straw, / and put her back on the streets.” In another poem
in this series, “A Woman’s Issue,” a young girl is “made to sing
while they scrape the flesh / from between her legs, then tie her thighs
/ till she scabs over and is called healed.” The area between a woman’s
legs is “enemy territory”; when violated, it is proof of man’s “uneasy
power.” A woman’s body is the theater on which men’s brutal rituals
are enacted, as they vie for supremacy.
The female body also demonstrates the unbreakable connection between
the Earth and women, proof of a woman’s vulnerability and mortality.
In “You Begin,” the speaker emphatically identifies the child’s
hand to teach her that her body is ultimately her own. “Five Poems
for Grandmothers” observes, sons “branch out, but / one woman leads
to another.” While the female body can represent continuity, sensual
pleasure, and self-reliance, in most of Atwood’s work, there is
some disjunction between substance and spirit, between flesh and
essence. In “The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart,” the narrator
characterizes a woman’s relationship to her body as an “uneasy truce,
/ and honor between criminals.”
