Margaret Atwood is a well-loved contemporary Canadian author. She’s written numerous fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books. The latter includes Dearly: New Poems, The Circle Game, and Power Politics. Her novels include The Handmaid’s Tale and The Robber Bride. She’s won numerous awards including the Man Booker Prize. Read more about Margaret Atwood.
Some of Atwood’s most famous poems include Half Hanged Mary, Siren Song, Procedures for Underground, and Sekhmet, The Lion-Headed Goddess Of War.
‘Flying Inside Your Own Body’ by Margaret Atwood speaks on the freedom one can achieve in the dream world, verses the restrictions of reality.
Your lungs fill & spread themselves,
wings of pink blood, and your bones
empty themselves and become hollow.
‘The City Planners’ by Margaret Atwood is an image-rich poem in which the poet depicts the fundamentally flawed nature of the suburbs.
Cruising these residential Sunday
streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
You're sad because you're sad.
It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical.
Go see a shrink or take a pill,
or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll
Bored by Margaret Atwood is a single stanza poem that reads as a fluid thought (or thoughts) ruminating on a complex experience of boredom throughout the speaker’s life.
All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
‘Bull Song’ by Margaret Atwood describes the short life of a bull who is forced to fight in a ring against human “gods” and is then cut up for the victors.
For me there was no audience
no brass music either,
only wet dust, the cheers
buzzing at me like flies,
‘Death of a Young Son by Drowning’ by Margaret Atwood is a beautiful and impactful poem about the death of Susanna Moodie’s young son. Atwood explores the grief of the mother and how her life changed.
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
Rumour was loose in the air
hunting for some neck to land on.
I was milking the cow,
the barn door open to the sunset
I’m telling the wrong lies,
they are not even useful.
The country beneath
the earth has a green sun
and the rivers flow backwards;
He was the sort of man
who wouldn't hurt a fly.
Many flies are now alive
while he is not.
This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
even the wolves, holding resonant
conversations in their
forests thickened with legend.
She is everywhere, intrusive as the smells
that bulge in under my doorsill;
she presides over my
meagre eating, generates
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ details the haunting compulsions and marriage of a murderous bridegroom and his innocent bride.
He would like not to kill. He would like
what he imagines other men have,
instead of this red compulsion. Why do the women
fail him and die badly? He would like to kill them gently,
‘This Is a Photograph of Me’ is the first poem of Margaret Atwood’s poetry collection, “The Circle Game,” published in 1964. This piece centers around a highly symbolic photograph.
It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
‘Vermilion Flycatcher, San Pedro River, Arizona’ by Margaret Atwood discusses the ways that nature changes and doesn’t change over time as well as humanity’s impact (or lack thereof).
The river’s been here, violent, right where we’re standing,
you can tell by the trash caught overhead in the trees.
Now it’s a trickle, and we’re up to our knees
You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
support@poemanalysis.com
Poem Solutions Limited, International House, 36-38 Cornhill, London, EC3V 3NG, United Kingdom
