Poetry

POETRY TEST

2006

This is a Photograph of Me

1 . The events of the poem seem to take place somewhere in a country-side or in suburbs ( small frame house , trees and lake , definitely outside a big city . That 's why the tone of the verse is slow and abounds in landscape sketches . Another evidence for rural scene of action in This is a Photograph of Me ' is that the picture was presumably seen by the narrator printed on a front-page of the local news . This is the picture of the lake

and the house of the suicide or the drowned (only small town newss print such news . It occurred to me that the one who speaks is a person who saw the picture of his /her own house and the lake nearby where he /she had drowned the day before . So , the second W '-question (When ) is answered by the author itself : some time ago . The photograph itself was taken the day after her death ( The photograph was taken the day after I drowned ) but presented to us maybe years later (actually , we don 't know whether the photo is blurred because of the years passed or it is smeared by an inexperienced photographer . So , the time is not so important . What really matters is the fact that somebody has drowned in the lake which we see on the previously trivial and useless picture

Yet , the enigma of the poem lies in the answer to the last W : who speaks . It seems that Margaret Atwood challenges her readers to find out where the point of the author 's voice is placed . The narrator is represented in the poem , however , if to read Atwood allegorically ( I am in the lake , in the center of the picture , just under the surface he is placed under the surface . The first three strophes don 't have I-narration (yet the author addresses you ' for making the conversation with readers more intimate . In fact , I-narration appears only in the second part of the poem being deemphasized by the brackets The speaker is a person who is dead . It is a restless soul that wants to tell her story but stops right at the beginning leaving us bewildered and striving to know more . Of course , Atwood doesn 't aim at mysterious Gothic shiver . Her postmodern verse rather deals with the confusion of time (some kind of a brokeback to the future : a real person , not a ghost , speaks of something that is further in time that he /she is . She (it is likely that a woman speaks ) has returned to bring a message

2 . Initially blear idea of This is a Photograph of Me ' by Margaret Atwood concerns human inability to distinguish between what is important and what is not (actually , it deals with our inability `to understand the picture directly . The author confuses readers when puts the main information into the brackets in the end of the poem and starts with landscape scenery which is not...