Themes
Civilization vs. Wilderness
Atwood constantly pits civilization against the wilderness
surrounding it and society against the savagery from which it arose.
She considers these oppositions to be some of the defining principles
of Canadian literature. They also provide a metaphor for the divisions within
the human personality. Society, civilization, and culture represent
the rational, contained side of humanity, while the wild forest represents
the very opposite: the irrational, primeval, and carnal impulses
that exist in every living being. In The Animals in That Country,
Atwood dramatizes the civilized urge to ignore the wildness lurking
just over the horizon: in “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer,”
she captures this theme with particular vividness: “In the darkness
the fields / defend themselves with fences / in vain: / everything
/ is getting in.”
Atwood elaborates on the uselessness of defending oneself against
the wilderness in The Journals of Susanna Moodie,
an account of a European immigrant’s struggles to navigate the wildernesses
of Canada, her adopted home. Almost every poem deals with this tension
in some form. In “This is a photograph of me,” the serene natural
setting presents a startling contrast to the human tragedy it masks.
The glossy “[m]ountains and lakes and more lakes” depicted on the
wall in “At the Tourist Centre in Boston” succeed only in reminding
the viewer of the gritty reality beneath the pictures. In “Siren
Song,” the jagged cliffs pulverize carefree sailors, who are in,
but not fully of, nature. In “Postcards” and other poems of that
era, cosmetic improvements to the natural world do little to mask
the savagery that preceded human intervention. Landscapes in Atwood’s
poems are harsh and brutal, wild and unconquerable, like the heart
of darkness within all humans.
The Inevitability of Death
Atwood demonstrates a remarkable determination to confront death
in her poetry. In “Another Elegy,” she asks: “Fine words, but why
do I want / to tart up death?” No aspect of life occurs without some
reminder of death. She is most interested in the decay of the body—or,
as she cautions in “Circe/Mud Poems,” “this body is not reversible.”
The historical poem “Marrying the Hangman” includes a related observation:
“There is only a death, indefinitely postponed.” The body is enslaved
to time and somehow disconnected from the person inside of it. “Time
is what we’re doing,” Atwood writes in “Time.” In “Bedside,” she
curses “the murderous body, the body / itself stalled in a field
of ice.” Atwood confronts the inevitability of death most explicitly
in the last section of another collection, Morning in the
Burned House. “Man in a Glacier” echoes the themes of “Bedside,”
as it literally represents a human body suspended in ice. “A Visit”
mourns the passage of her father’s days of activity and lucidity.
In “Flowers,” the speaker observes a dying father and realizes that
she will undergo the same experience. Nothing can stop the relentless
march of death.
Motifs
Photographs
In her poems, Atwood uses photographs to explore identity,
particularly the facades women adopt to conform (at least superficially)
to society. “This is a photograph of me,” the first poem in her
first collection, plays with the conventional equation of appearance
and reality. The photograph obscures, rather than reveals, the speaker’s mysterious
identity and history. Similarly, the speaker of “In the Tourist
Centre in Boston” reflects on the perceived discrepancy between
photographic images of Canada and her own memories of the place.
The speaker’s “private mirage” takes precedence over the glossy
colorized certainties depicted in the photographs. In the poem “Girl
and Horse, 1928,”
from Procedures for Underground, the speaker contemplates
an old photograph of a girl, “someone I never knew,” and tries to
imagine what the girl was thinking. In the end of the poem, the
speaker turns over the photograph, whereupon the girl waves and
rides “out of sight.” Thus photographs are no longer static recorders
of a fixed history in which “nothing can change, grow older.” Instead,
photographs represent the truths a viewer chooses to invent. More
than a decade later, in “Postcards,” Atwood describes a photograph
only to comment on its inability to capture the realities of a place.
Symbols
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.”
