B. "You fit into me" by Margaret Atwood
Atwood, Margaret. "You fit into me." Introduction to Poetry. 12th ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2007. 122.
"you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye"(lines 1-4).
As simple as this poem is, it has a whole lot of ambiguity going on. There is the repitition of the word "eye" in lines two and four. "Hook" is also repeated twice. I assume the speaker is a woman, since Atwood was a lady. In the first two lines, the speaker is describing how well her lover fits into her life. We could also assume that the speaker wants us to think that this other person is not even a lover, but maybe an enemy. The way I see that is because when one thinks of the word "Hook", you most certainely think of something sharp that is piercing the "eye". The eye could be the eyeball on your face. It could also be a button that hooks perfectly into your jacket. When I read this poem I automatically thought of the sharp hook going in to the eyesocket, but when I looked up the words hook and eye, I believed the speaker was trying to say that her lover fits into her life. The repetition of the word eye is meaningful because you must imagine that the eye is delicate and fragile, just like your heart.
1 comment:
I really enjoyed this poem, because it is witty, clever, open to interpretation and says a lot without many words. I believe that there is no lost love between the speaker and the person they are referring to. Since the poem is quite vague, it could be the speaker talking to her former lover, to an enemy, a former friend, or maybe even a relative. It is obvious that the author used a pun with the word 'hook' and 'eye';the first two lines create a soft image, while the last two a grotesque one. Since Atwood, the poem's author, was a known femenist and human's right activist, I like to think that this piece is to a former lover, whence the speaker is asserting her clear dislike of the subject and thereby asserting her independence.
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