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Morning In The Burned House By Margaret Atwood

1391 Words6 Pages

On the surface, Margaret Atwood’s poem “Morning in the Burned House”, concerns a speaker who has ostensibly come to visit a ruined house. Initially, the reader may assume that the speaker is a stranger to the house, an outsider wondering over the destruction that she has stumbled across. However, details reveal that the speaker has actually come to revisit her burned childhood home. Through this scenario, Atwood explores the themes of nostalgia and how adulthood is a irrevocably transformative occurrence. The poem opens with one experience superimposed upon another: “In the burned house I am eating breakfast,/You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,/yet here I am.” One may wonder whether the speaker is immediately proving herself …show more content…

Incandescent.” In the previous three lines, only the clothes were described as burned, but now the speaker describes her flesh as cindery, the only thing holding it together being a child’s t-shirt. However, the t-shirt is not untouched either. In the earlier lines, her pants were described as “thin” and “green”, but weren’t said to be touched by the destructive powers of fire. This means that the speaker once saw her past as something innocence and untouched, but now she imagines a childhood shirt as “grubby”, meaning that her past was not as idealistic as she perhaps believes it to have been. This recalls her seeing the flaws in the glass. Finally, the speaker returns to feeling disconnected with her experience. By referring to her flesh as “cindery”, she knows that she has been changed, just like the house has been, but she also feels nonexistent. This recalls imagery almost similar to a ghost, especially when she adds that her skin is “incandescent”. This allusion to feeling like a ghost ties back into the idea of feeling alien in a place once familiar. She’s remnant of a past era of the house when it was not burned, and yet, she herself is haunted as well--haunted by her memories of her childhood and what the house was once

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