Margaret Atwood Annotations

In the poem “Habitations” by Margaret Atwood is about the difficulties of marriage between a husband and a wife that they face together. The theme of this poem is “trying to start/make a fire” means trying to ignite a passion in a cold desolate marriage. In this poem the speaker uses language and imagery to help explore a deeper dynamic and its bond.
The author creates two parallel settings throughout the poem to emphasize the amount of work needed to maintain a marriage. The author makes the setting a shadow dark, talking about cold, a forest and making a fire, but underneath that, she creates a common sense of hope. Rather than portrayal all the beau ideal of a marriage and the happiness and good times, the poem is structured in a way that the unpleasant situations are brand to seem as important as the foundations of a house. In the first stanza, the speaker begins with “marriage is not a house or even a tent. It is before that, and colder;” .The setting portrays that the idea of marriage isn’t necessarily represented by the idea of a home or protection. Rather, the speaker gives the allegory that marriage is cold. The strict importance can be taken as though the speaker's marriage is spent for the most part outside. Be that as it may, "cold" represents the

These images infer brutal states of marriage and strikingly have an association with the title of the poem, “Habitations” because the imagery show the reality of marriage as the title of the poem describes the realistic of a marriage. When Atwood introduces the simple images in the third and fourth stanza, she begins by saying the “edge of”: “the edge of the forest”, “the edge of the desert”, “the edge of the receding glacier”. When you first think of the edge of somewhere, you know it is dangerous place to stand. The “edge of” represents the beginning of a marriage and the struggles being