ipl-logo

An Analysis Of Margaret Atwood's Variations On The Word Sleep

855 Words4 Pages
Who in this mortal world does not fear death? May it be one’s own death or the death of their loved one, this subject invokes a certain heaviness in one’s heart. In most cases, the latter is something much more excruciating to the human soul, since losing someone lets one feel it in life, whereas one feels nothing at all after death. This situation is prevalent in “Variations on the Word Sleep”, a poem by Margaret Atwood. In this poem, the speaker craves to be with the audience even in their sleep and is willing to go through lengths to do so, such as bringing them back to life. Here, Atwood uses symbolism and the speaker’s desperation to convey that the hardships of losing a loved one to death. In “Variations on the Word Sleep”, the structure and grammar of the poem is askew. For example, for a few times, phrases are repeated with a punctuation added, or there is a punctuation missing. The first example is seen when it says, “I would like to watch you sleeping” (Atwood 1-2), and it contrasts the line, “I would like to watch you, / sleeping” (3-4). It is the same set of words, but the insertion of the comma changes the meaning of the sentence. In the first, it means that the speaker simply wishes to watch the other person sleeping, while in the second, the speaker is actually sleeping as they watch the other. This shows that they wish to join the other in slumber, wishing to not be away with the other since they are willing to join the other even when they are not awake.
Show More
Related
1107 Words | 5 Pages

Holocaust Literary Analysis The novel Night as well as the movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas adequately show the amount of indifference and unprovoked suffering that the Jews had to endure in the Holocaust. However, despite both the novel and movie showing similar themes, they both had scenes in which they portrayed their theme in different ways. The novel Night is about a family being stripped of all things humane in their life and being separated and forced into a life of excruciating work and suffering. The movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is about the son of a German soldier at the time of the Holocaust who moves near a concentration camp and becomes close to a young Jewish prisoner.

Read More
365 Words | 2 Pages

‘’Thanatopisis’’ like one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. ’’ This quote is describing how he laid down and died peacefully, Feeling death is a welcoming gift. ‘’Devil and Tom Walker’’ emotion in this poem is in my opinion is considered wicked. ‘’He leaped for joy; for he recognized his wife’s apron.

Read More
910 Words | 4 Pages

Death plays a bigger role in life than life itself. When people die, people cry, and while people cry, a clear moment of lucidity occurs. Death is what makes every moment worth living and is told through stories of books and movies with symbols both subtle and blunt. Night, for example, is an autobiographical novel recalling Eliezer’s experience through concentration camps while The Book Thief is a historical fiction film where Liesel is a bystander who participates in activities symbolizing war. History is intertwined death.

Read More
1131 Words | 5 Pages

When a loved one dies, it can be difficult to cope with the loss. The loss can be overwhelmingly devastating which results in the desperate desire to connect with the person who has died. To compensate, people often insist on keeping the loved one’s spirit with them through memory. However, oftentimes the death is so unimaginable and the impact so great, it results in the denial of death and the subsequent altering of these memories. Denial of death undermines memory by fabricating understanding of events, and in Tim O’Brian’s “The Lives of The Dead,” Tim’s memories of a childhood crush Linda, demonstrate his denial through his altered visual, auditory, and emotional memories.

Read More
202 Words | 1 Pages

A closer analyzation of Ambrose Bierce’s most famous work, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” shows that the pain of death, although inevitable and extremely keen at its onset, fades as the consciousness loses track of time and reality. In describing the death of Peyton Farquhar, Bierce uses a third person omniscient narrator to describe the pangs and sensations of death through synesthesia. As we read through the passage, we are able to feel Farquhar’s pain “shoot from his neck down through every fiber of his body and limbs” because it is described in a way that triggers our sense of touch. We become aware of the burning sensation felt throughout his body, imagining the “streams of pulsating fire heating him to an intolerable temperature”

Read More
241 Words | 1 Pages

The author of On the Fear of Death, Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross discusses her perspective and research, giving us her insight on the influences she thought cause individuals to fear death. Kubler-Ross spent most of her later life studying people’s attitudes and emotions towards death known as thanatology, the study of death. She traveled the world to speak with those close to death and

Read More
932 Words | 4 Pages

Throughout her poem, “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –,” the speaker of the poem is dying in her deathbed surrounded by loved ones, and how she is experiencing a memory of death and how she is enduring it. As the people at the deathbed are “gathering firm” around her, they are in an understanding that she will die and are waiting for her demised (Dickinson). The “eyes” of the beloved ones were flowing of tears and crying to the dying loved one of the deathbed (Dickinson). Throughout Dickinson’s poem, no happiness is brought upon inside the poem because all that the author sees the theme of death as sadness and

Read More
1339 Words | 6 Pages

“Baby Lies So Fast Asleep” is a short poem in which a mother explains to her surviving child the death of her baby. In keeping with Rossetti’s themes, the mother in the poem uses sleep as a gentler euphemism in place of death. The poem starts off on a melancholy tone, with the death of being an inescapable truth. However, the views of death and the afterlife come soon after with the question in lines

Read More
551 Words | 3 Pages

From the beginning, children are taught to fear the concept of death. Most people spend their lives fearing death, but it’s not death that they are afraid of. It is part of nature to die, and our minds know that, what scares most people is the thought of death before they have had time to accomplish what they want in life. In “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be,” John Keats put into words how people feel about dying before they have been successful in whatever mission they have set forth for themselves. His poem touches the reality of people’s feelings though imagery and figurative language.

Read More
975 Words | 4 Pages

In the poem “Because I could not stop for death” by Emily Dickinson, death is described as a person, and the narrator is communicating her journey with death in the afterlife. During the journey the speaker describes death as a person to accompany her during this journey. Using symbolism to show three locations that are important part of our lives. The speaker also uses imagery to show why death isn 't’ so scary.

Read More
800 Words | 4 Pages

Walt Whitman is one of the leading mystic poets of death in the field of American poetry. Death is assigned a distinguished space in his poetic universe of Leaves of Grasswhich immensely colours his vision of life. This paper is an attempt to present Whitman’s attitude towards death vis-à-vis global mystic perspective. Reality of Death

Read More
796 Words | 4 Pages

“I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move” written by Louise Erdrich focuses on a child and a grandfather horrifically observing a flood consuming their entire village and the surrounding trees, obliterating the nests of the herons that had lived there. In the future they remember back to the day when they started cleaning up after the flood, when they notice the herons without their habitat “dancing” in the sky. According to the poet’s biographical context, many of the poems the poet had wrote themselves were a metaphor. There could be many viable explanations and themes to this fascinating poem, and the main literary devices that constitute this poem are imagery, personification, and a metaphor.

Read More
502 Words | 3 Pages

Portrayals of Women in The Big Sleep In The Big Sleep, women are treated more as objects than human beings. When they are treated like human beings, they are still being viewed as unintelligent, inferior troublemakers who are incapable of doing things for themselves. Often, they are smacked and thrown around like ragdolls and talked down to in a degrading manner. The character of Carmen Sternwood is one of the main female characters portrayed this way.

Read More
867 Words | 4 Pages

The Transformation that Changes our Lives The poet Emily Dickinson in her poem, I Felt a Funeral in my Brain that is the first line of the poem, not a special title that Dickinson chose. It tells about the story of the experience of the speaker in the poem who is transforming from place to another. Many readers would take this poem as an explanation of what happens after death, what the dead body feels in the funeral.

Read More
560 Words | 3 Pages

Carl Sandburg, a novelist and poet, emphasizes ideas such as love, death, and many other themes in most of his works. He has complied many poems and novels throughout his career and many of his poems have been published in A Magazine of Verse (PBS). Overtime, the American people grew very fond of Sandburg, and he was commemorated as the “Poet of the People” in the United States. In “Cool Tombs”, Sandburg uses rousing diction and imagery to depict death as peaceful and restful, rather than frightening and terminal. Sandburg used stirring diction to convey death as peaceful.

Read More

More about An Analysis Of Margaret Atwood's Variations On The Word Sleep

Related Topics

Open Document