The Love Theme: Atwood's Variation on the Word Sleep and Purdy's Alive or Not
Love is, not surprisingly, one of the most frequent themes in all literary creations and especially in poetry. As such, throughout the centuries, love has been represented in many different ways in poetry, according to the specific aspect that the poets were trying to communicate. The two chosen poems, Variation on the Word Sleep by Margaret Atwood and Alive or Not by Al Purdy appear to be dissimilar at a first glance. Upon a profounder examination though, the poems reveal a few common elements. While love is certainly the theme of both poems, it somehow seems to elude the reader at first. This is because the poems are somehow atypical: they seem to avoid the intensity of the actual feeling of love and focus on the representation of two dream sequences instead. Atwood's poem translates the author's wish to plunge into the dream of her lover, while Purdy's text relates a bizarre dream in which he is trying to save his wife from an accident. Both poems offer thus different a perspective on love from inside the dream which focuses on its haunting power and the way the feeling travels to the subconscious.Thus, neither of the two poems seems to target the feeling as such and its effect on the person who experiences it. Rather, they b
Interestingly, time elapses in the dream and the author grows older and older while this single sequence is repeated over and over. It could be concluded then that his story is probably inspired by a real event, a tragic accident that caused the lover's death. The rapture that is usually associated with love is missing here, being substituted by stolid heaviness of the dream. The 'plot' of the poem if it could be thus called is also enticing: the man is trying to reach the falling woman, and, as in dreams, this brief moment lasts long enough to allow him to think and observe. Like Atwood's poem therefore, this one focuses on the traces that love or, in this case, the sufferance caused by love can leave on the subconscious. "(Atwood, 115) Atwood thus longs for new ways of sharing her love with the male the poem is addressed to. The fact that he feels "horror" as in front of the death of an orchid is probably the only allusion to love in the poem. The silver branch, the white flower, the boat, the stairway or the three moons are all symbolic dream-elements, signifying the journey or the descent into the dark subconscious state. Thus, Atwood emphasizes in her poem another way of experiencing love and the other, through a sort of primitive and elemental union. The feeling of utter helplessness betrays a deep and unhealed wound. "(Purdy, 35) What is interesting here is the feeling that he is not able to catch his lover and save her.
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