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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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The Colonial Period was from 1492 to 1763. During this time many new writing styles and opinions were established by various different writers. Anne Bradstreet, a female poet known as the first Colonial settler and the first woman in England to publish a book of poems. One of her famous poems, “ The Burning of Our House”, refers back to religion and her belief in God/Him many times. The last line of the poem, “ My hope and treasure lies above”, influences the theme to be, spiritual possessions are more important than material possessions.

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However, she then goes on to list the different items that she lost in the fire and you can sense her longing for them. She states “No pleasant tale shall 'ere be told, Nor things recounted done of old.” She recognized that there will be no more memories made in this house and in a sense, she is truly not accepting of this. By doing this, she is going against her Christian beliefs, which look down upon materialism and forgetting her purpose is to serve god and accept the fate he has in store for

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She had someone who took care of her plants, but other than that, the rest of the house was peeling and the once white paint that encircled her house began to turn yellow. The reader could view this as an example of how she feels about the public; she did not care for the town’s opinions of her so she neglected to keep up with the part of the house that they could see. Not only did she give up on her house, but based on the town’s description of her, she also gave up on herself. They described her skeleton as small and spare, which could be

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The poem “Verses Upon the Burning of our Houses” describes a person’s thoughts as their house burns down. The narrator realized through the experience that their earthly possessions are not nearly as important as God and what he has in store for them in heaven. During the beginning the narrator was woken up from people screaming, “fire.” They then asked God to help them through what was happening and to not leave them helpless. As the narrator went outside, they saw the house in flames.

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