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Summary

Margaret Atwood presents a mind or voice that feels its own boundaries thinning. The poem begins in a strangely intimate state of self-dissolution: the self no longer seems fixed, but instead becomes a restless desire to take in the world and even another person. That desire is imagined through plant life and breathing, as if the ideal form of closeness would be gentle, green, and sustaining rather than invasive.

As the poem moves forward, that hopeful fantasy breaks under the pressure of human reality. The voice admits that it does not have leaves, only eyes and teeth, and that this anatomy makes pure, harmless merging impossible. The poem then shifts from dreamy absorption to blunt warning: the hunger it describes is not something reason can settle, because it behaves more like an instinct for survival than a polite emotional need. The final image of a starved dog reduces desire to bare necessity, leaving the poem poised between longing for union and the fear of possession.

Theme

• Desire for union - The poem imagines a wish to merge with another person so fully that separation disappears, turning intimacy into a kind of total absorption.
• Limits of the body - The repeated contrast between plant life and human anatomy shows that the body resists the speaker's ideal of effortless closeness.
• Appetite and possession - Hunger in the poem is not gentle craving but a force that pulls everything inward, suggesting love can shade into control.
• Conflict between reason and instinct - The voice admits that this urge cannot be explained or negotiated, emphasizing the power of bodily impulse over calm thought.
• Vulnerability and warning - The poem sounds openly self-aware and even self-accusing, as if the speaker knows the desire is dangerous and wants the other person to stay alert.

Literary Devices

• Extended metaphor - The poem sustains a comparison between desire and biological processes, especially plant metabolism and hunger, to describe emotional appetite.
• Imagery - Vivid bodily and natural images such as skin, leaves, air, bones, and teeth give the poem its unsettling physical texture.
• Personification - Desire is given an almost independent force, as if it can draw, consume, and organize the world around itself.
• Contrast - The poem opposes green, harmless plant life with teeth, starvation, and bone to highlight the difference between ideal and actual desire.
• Free verse - The loose lineation mirrors the speaker's unstable emotional state and allows thoughts to spill forward without neat containment.
• Enjambment - The movement across line breaks creates a sense of overflow, matching the poem's theme of boundaries dissolving.
• Hyperbole - Phrases suggesting total absorption and complete surrounding enlarge the feeling of craving beyond ordinary affection.
• Irony - The speaker longs for a harmless form of taking in the world, yet the very confession reveals how impossible that harmlessness is.

Symbolism

• Leaves - They symbolize a natural, nonviolent way of taking in life, one the speaker envies but cannot possess.
• Skin - The skin marks the boundary between self and other, and the wish to pass through it suggests a desire to erase separation.
• Eyes - They represent perception and want, replacing the plant's gentle intake with a human form of grasping attention.
• Teeth - Teeth symbolize the more aggressive, consuming side of need, the bodily fact that makes pure assimilation impossible.
• Air - Air stands for an ideal surrounding presence, something sustaining and complete without being devoured.
• Bones - Bones suggest the bare minimum left after hunger has stripped everything else away, reducing desire to survival logic.

Tone

Atwood's tone is intimate, unsettling, and wryly self-aware, as if the poem is confessing a desire it cannot endorse. There is a cool intelligence in the diction, but it is paired with a rising sense of menace that makes the poem feel both thoughtful and dangerous. The mood for the reader shifts from dreamy expansiveness to alarm, ending in an image of hunger so basic that it feels almost feral.

Historical Context

Atwood's poetry often reflects modern anxieties about power, appetite, gender, and the unstable boundaries between self and other. Her work belongs to a late twentieth-century literary climate in which intimate relationships are frequently examined through images of bodily control, psychological pressure, and ecological or biological metaphor. The poem's tension between reason and instinct also fits a broader modernist and postmodern interest in fractured subjectivity rather than unified, stable identity.

The use of natural imagery to question human desire connects the poem to a long tradition of lyric writing, while its blunt self-scrutiny feels distinctly contemporary. Rather than treating love as idealized harmony, the poem exposes how closeness can contain possession, risk, and the urge to consume.

Similar Poems

• Love After Love - Derek Walcott
• The More Loving One - W. H. Auden
• A Consumer's Report - A. R. Ammons
• Meeting at Night - Robert Browning