Morning in the Burned House

The titular poem of Morning in the Burned House utilizes remembered images to navigate loss. Throughout the collection as a whole, Atwood’s speakers recall memories, juxtaposing them with feelings that take place in the now, creating a shifting space between past and present. In “Morning in the Burned House” specifically, the speaker mentally “enters” a house that was important in their past and mourns both an earlier innocence while owning the experience of the self as it passes away from that previous time period.

The speaker situates themselves in “the burned house” (Line 1) at the beginning of the poem, which helps to ground the specific place. It is “morning,” so the speaker is “eating breakfast” (Line 1). However, the solidity of time and space is immediately distorted, as the speaker says, “[T]here is no house, there is no breakfast” (Line 2). Instead, the scene is a memory of a specific house that has now “burned” (Line 1). While the physical house no longer stands, the speaker is still present—“here I am” (Line 3)—in their memory of it. The speaker thus flits between the past (in which they exist in the house), the present (where the house does not exist), and the future (when their existence will cease as well).