Analysis of Margaret Atwood's Lyric Poem This is a Photograph of Me

This is a Photograph of Me by Margaret Atwood poem is a lyric, which means it's spoken by someone who, as the title suggests, describes a photograph of them. We're told the photo was taken 'some time ago.' The speaker describes the photograph's contents to us, revealing that what appears to be a smudge in one corner is actually a branch of a tree. There is also a small house in the photograph, as well as a lake and some hills in the background.

The speaker then reveals, in a devastating parenthesis that concludes the poem, that they are dead, and that this photograph was taken the day after they drowned. They are not clearly visible in the photograph, but they drowned in the lake in the background, just beneath the surface. According to the speaker, if we look hard enough, we should be able to see them beneath the lake's surface.

In my opinion, 'This Is a Photograph of Me' poem is a troubling poem because of how casually it transitions from a matter-of-fact description to a terrible revelation: the poem is being spoken from beyond the grave. In this way, the poem 'gives a voice to the voiceless,' as we often say about works of literature narrated or spoken by people who are socially marginalized. And the dead have no voice; the drowned, too, raise troubling questions. Did the dead speaker in Margaret Atwood's poem drown by accident or on purpose? And, if the latter, whose design is it? Is this a suicide or a murder? Was the speaker a man or a woman? Was it a small child? There are several reasons to believe this, though Atwood only provides hints.

The poem's first feature is its show-and-tell nature ('This Is a Photograph of Me' is oddly performative, as if the child were standing up in front of the class at school and showing the picture, in a version of 'what I did during the school holidays'). Second, there is the straightforward, simple, even naive manner in which the speaker conveys the news that they have died: they bury (or drown) the key revelation beneath a slew of minor or even trivial details, only one of which will be directly relevant (that lake in the background).

The language used by the speaker also suggests a younger person, albeit one with some education: they know the tree in the photograph is either balsam or spruce, but can't tell the difference. Even if we conclude that there is insufficient evidence to declare the speaker to be a child, there is a certain innocence to their manner of addressing us (and look at how we are quietly and unassumingly ushered into their confidence through the use of the second this, along with the syntax, contributes to the unsettling nature of Atwood's poem (placing the shocking twist in parentheses as though, like the earlier brackets surrounding the detail about the tree, this later revelation was no more important). Person pronoun, 'you,' so we are made complicit in whatever happened to them as if we are responsible for finding their body).

When they would be a weakness of course it must have strengths in this poem that can attract the reader to read it which is the 'This Is a Photograph of Me' poem also raises intriguing questions about the relationship between visual and verbal (or written) representation. Because the process of photography uses light to capture and reproduce images (much like photocopying), the word 'photography' comes from the ancient Greek for 'light-writing.' A number of details in the poem, beginning with the title, implying that the photograph described in the poem and the poem itself serve as two types of 'text.'

Begin with the title, 'This Is a Photograph of Me': it alludes to the (described) photograph, but the deictic 'This' also implies that this (i.e. the poem that the title also describes or denotes) is the photograph. In the first stanza, the speaker's references to smeared/print' (the print of the page? ), 'blurred lines' (verse lines? ), and 'paper' all allude to both the poetic and photographic texts.

Similarly, in the following stanza, one might 'scan' a photograph for specific details, but one also scans a poem (scansion is the term for analyzing the meter of a poem). So, from the start, we are invited into a troubling relationship with both the poem and the photograph, with both the speaker and the (supposed) subject. The photograph is the subject of the poem, but the speaker is the subject of the photograph, even if they are displaced, invisible beneath the surface of that lake.

In conclusion, The poem 'This Is a Photograph of Me' has 26 lines: The first 14 words describe the photograph, and the last 12 (in parentheses) usher us deeper into the speaker's confidence with the first use of the 'I' pronoun. The traditional sonnet's length of 14 lines establishes a fairly traditional rural scene, a landscape described in a million nature poems. The bracketed aside, however, overturns this sonnet-length description by revealing the dark secret lurking beneath the surface of the lake and, by implication, within all such nature scenes. In the end, this free verse poem, like all good free-verse poems, is not as artless or loose as it appears. Its syntax, punctuation, and length all contribute to the sinister and troubling atmosphere.