Spelling

Margaret Atwood begins with a deceptively ordinary scene: a daughter on the floor with plastic letters, learning to spell. That childlike lesson quickly widens into something far more charged, because spelling is also linked to making spells, and language becomes a source of power, inheritance, and danger. The poem moves from domestic play to a meditation on women, motherhood, and the long history of female silencing, suggesting that the simple act of naming is never simple at all.

As the poem develops, Atwood contrasts two pressured identities: the child who is being formed and the woman who may have sacrificed motherhood for language, art, or survival. The "However" marks a refusal to choose between child and poem, body and word, yet the poem keeps returning to scenes of violence against women whose speech and fertility have been controlled. By the end, the poem asks how one learns to spell, then answers through elemental images of blood, sky, sun, and the self's first naming. The central idea is that language is both creation and inheritance: to name oneself is to enter a tradition shaped by loss, resistance, and power, while still finding a living voice.

Tone in Spelling

Atwood's tone is thoughtful, urgent, and quietly fierce, moving from intimate observation to a larger argument about language and female experience. The mood shifts from tender and curious in the opening scene to tense and haunted as the poem recalls war, bondage, and witch-burning, then ends in a charged sense of awakening, as if language itself is being discovered at the edge of the body.

Themes in Spelling

• Language as power - The poem treats words as more than tools for communication; they shape reality, carry authority, and can act almost like magic.
• Motherhood and artistic identity - Atwood sets the experience of having a daughter against the demands of making poetry, refusing to reduce a woman to either role alone.
• Female silencing - Images of the bound mother and the gagged witch suggest a history in which women's bodies and voices have been restrained.
• Inheritance across generations - The daughter, the mother, and the ancestral figures are linked through a shared history of language, suffering, and survival.
• Creation and naming - Spelling becomes a larger metaphor for how identity is formed through first words, first names, and first acts of self-definition.
• Violence and transformation - The poem turns bodily pain into a source of insight, showing how breaking, burning, or opening can also produce speech and truth.

Literary Devices in Spelling

• Wordplay - The link between spelling and spells gives the title and opening lines a double meaning, connecting literacy with enchantment and power.
• Metaphor - The poem repeatedly turns language into physical force, especially in the image of words becoming a mouth or power.
• Imagery - Concrete details such as plastic letters, curtains, blood, and bones make the poem's abstract questions vivid and unsettling.
• Contrast - Atwood places a child at play beside scenes of war, childbirth, and suppression, heightening the emotional stakes of language.
• Repetition - Phrases like "word after a word" and repeated references to naming emphasize accumulation, insistence, and verbal force.
• Fragmentation - Short sections and abrupt shifts mimic thought moving through memory, reflection, and argument rather than following a neat linear pattern.
• Enjambment - The line breaks propel the poem forward and create tension, especially where meaning spills over into the next line.
• Symbolism - Ordinary objects and actions stand for larger struggles over identity, creativity, and control.

Symbolism in Spelling

• Plastic letters - They symbolize the first materials of language, but also the artificial, constructed nature of spelling and identity.
• Spells - The word suggests the power of language to influence, create, and transform reality beyond simple literacy.
• The woman caught in the war - She stands for the historical and political control of women's bodies, especially the denial of motherhood and speech.
• The burning witch - This figure symbolizes the persecution of women whose knowledge or voice has been feared.
• Blood - Blood suggests life, pain, lineage, and the physical cost of creation.
• First name / first word - These stand for identity at its beginning, when naming becomes the first act of selfhood.

Historical Context of Spelling

Atwood writes within a late twentieth-century feminist literary context that often reexamines women's roles as mothers, artists, and inheritors of cultural memory. Her poem echoes broader concerns in modern and contemporary poetry about how language can both empower and exclude, especially when linked to gender, authority, and the body.

The poem also draws on older cultural histories: witch persecution, wartime violence, and the traditional association between women and silence or domesticity. By bringing those histories into contact with a child's spelling lesson, Atwood turns a small everyday scene into a meditation on how cultural power is passed down and challenged through words.

Poems Similar to Spelling

• Digging - Seamus Heaney
• Morning Song - Sylvia Plath
• Aunt Jennifer's Tigers - Adrienne Rich
• The Weaver - Elizabeth Bishop