Margaret Atwood's Winter

Winter is a season filled with a mixture of love and hate. Someone may be fascinated by snow and the winter months, and someone else may want to crawl in a hole and not come out until its spring. Which category of a ‘winter person’ would you fall into? With this in mind, Margaret Atwood’s poem “February” uses tone, dramatic monologue, and figurative language to represent that difficult situations do not last forever.

Understandably, you can start to see that the tone of the poem seems to be gloomy and miserable by just reading the first few sentences. An example of this is: the first line, “Winter.” The speaker only uses one word in the sentence and ends it with a period. Can you be any more serious? Words such as “fat”, “pewter”, “Houdini”,

Knowing this, the woman seems to be talking to a silent audience. Did she write this poem about when she first woke up one morning? Is she talking to herself? Is she talking out loud to nobody? Or is she just talking at her cat? This idea also relates to the tone of the poem because she is making herself miserable. The speaker may have had nobody to talk to or chose to not speak to anyone about how she was feeling. The speaker also seems to compare humans to animals in her stream of consciousness and does not always make sense. Some examples of the woman comparing humans to animals are: when she talks about her “greedy” and “whiny” cat, as well as when she says, “Or eat our young, like sharks.” She also talks about eating “fat”. This idea reminds me of a bear eating a lot of food right before getting ready to hibernate for the winter. Eating lots of food is beneficial to both humans and animals when it comes to the winter months in order to stay warm. As for the speaker not making complete sense in the poem; an example is when she was talking about a television show and sex in succession. She says, “He shoots, he scores! And the famine crouches in the bed sheets…”. This shows that the speaker was thinking about something from television; but combined the thought with sex. Also, since there is nobody there to help clarify what the speaker is talking about; it is hard to tell what the woman is truly trying to get across in her