Against Still Life
In the poem Against Still Life, poet Margaret Atwood fascinates us by weaving her words into descriptive feelings we can all relate too, especially women. Atwood is a well known poet and novelist who has a certain way of grabbing the attention of the reader and throwing the reader’s thoughts around without her even realizing it. In Against Still Life for example, Atwood opens her poem with an orange, nothing more than an orange. By the end of the poem she has got the reader pondering what men think about. It is assumed that Atwood is the speaker of the poem and the setting is simply a situation most of us can find ourselves in often. The speaker of the poem is Margaret Atwood herself. She describes thoughts that would only belong to her. Atwood uses the word “I” to describe herself in the poem and “you” to describe a second party other than the reader, who we later find to be a man. The poem, seems as though it is directed as a thought to the man, not a conversation or a poem for him to read, but Atwood’s desire to know this man’s thoughts. Atwood is clever, and describes feelings and the frustrations that any woman has felt about a man. This makes us
She can only see the outside of the orange in the same way that she can only see the outside of the man. She knows that this man has the same thoughts about her. It frustrates her even more that he doesn’t and won’t tell her that he has these feelings. Atwood wants to be able to relate her feelings to his feelings any way she can, and she feels as though his orange silence will not let her. “[M]ake me want to wrench you into saying: now I’d crack your skull like a walnut, split it like a pumpkin to make you talk, or get a look inside” (Muller 256). There is a constant battle in our world; men want to know how women really work and think, and women want to know what men really work and think. really wonder if Atwood truly feels this way, or if she is just describing feelings that a general woman have about a general man. As she continues to describe her intense feelings on how she wants to know what’s inside the man, she mentions a thing of great importance. At least another writer knows why you are being so strange. It is said that Atwood often writes of food in her publications because she feels as though women have come to feel uncomfortable with themselves and food. The woman is sitting there with orange and man in perfect line of view. But she doesn’t care, she wants to know everything from the beginning. Atwood weaves words together so that it could be any woman or man, any where, any place, sitting across from a person of the opposite sex wanting to know what the other is all about. Atwood paints the scene beautifully. I believe Atwood does this to make herself and the reader feel more comfortable with the frustrations she describes.
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Acceptance Essays
