21 pages • 42-minute read
Morning in the Burned House
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Morning in the Burned House” is a free-verse poem of 36 lines divided into stanzas of three lines called tercets. The lines themselves do not employ meter and vary in length. Organization rests instead on the flow of thoughts and emotions and how they shift the solidity of the narrative.
The first half of the poem deals directly with the house, who does and does not occupy it, and what it contains, along with the view of the outdoors from its interior. This section places the speaker within a memory or dream since “there is no house […] / yet here [they are]” (Lines 2-3). It notes the absence of other members of the household and then enumerates the items in the house and finally looks outdoors. A tonal switch occurs as the speaker notes that “[i]n the east a bank of cloud / rises up silently like dark bread” (Lines 17-18), creating greater complexity.
The second half of the poem is driven by tension as the speaker begins to push away from the memory as well as their past selves. They cannot “see” (Lines 19-22) rightly here and cannot feel their “own body” (Line 27). The burned house becomes a metaphor for the speaker’s childhood self, who is also reduced to ash. The second half employs anaphora (the repetition of beginning phrases) on two occasions, including lines about sight—“I can see” (Lines 19-20) and “I can’t see” (Line 22)—and variants about physical manifestation of form—“including my own body” (Line 27) and “including the body” (Lines 28-29). Anaphoric phrases only occur in the second half of the poem and show how the speaker wrestles with the shifting of their identity from innocent child to grieving adult, creating a kind of stutter or psychological panic. This organizational drive gives the poem its power, which is why the speaker’s reduction of the self into flame at the end feels final.
Juxtaposition
In order to convey the topsy-turvy way that memories, dreams, and nightmares work, the speaker of “Morning in the Burned House” deliberately uses juxtaposition, particularly in asides like “I can’t see my own arms and legs […] / finding myself back here, where everything / in this house has long been over” (Lines 22-25). The idea of floating between what is tangible or corporeal and the ghostly memory that is either a “trap or blessing” (Line 23) is at the core of the poem.
These opposing forces are large and philosophical, but Atwood’s phrasing shows that the dichotomies are also made minutely as well, adding to the surreal quality of the experience. For example, when the speaker notes how a “spoon which was melted scrapes” (Line 4), it juxtaposes the metallic sound of the utensil against a solid object with the fact that it was “melted” (Line 4) in the fire. There is no spoon, yet, like the speaker, “here [it is]” (Line 3).
This tension continues with the description of the “forest watchful” (Line 16), a phrase that gives the non-sentient trees a cognizant presence. The juxtaposition that adds the most to the poem’s main crux appears at the end: Not only are the house and its surroundings both here and not here, but so is the speaker. As the child goes up in flames, their “flesh” (Line 36), which suggests tangible corporeality, is “cindery, non-existent” (Line 35). These disjunctions add to the emotional feeling of the character’s distress at observing themselves in two separate places: as a child who no longer exists and as an adult who will someday not exist in the future.
Consonance
At the end of “Morning in the Burned House,” the speaker realizes that they must burn away the memory of their child self. To help convey the intensity of this, Atwood’s narrator begins to employ consonance by using words that use the sibilant “s,” doubling its previous use. In the seven lines prior to the last seven, the use of “s” exists only eight times: in the phrases “this is a trap or blessing” (Line 23) and “this house has” (Line 25) and in the words “myself” (Line 24) and “spoon” (Line 26).
However, in the seven lines that come next until the poem’s conclusion, the usage increases to 17 times as the image of the child in the burned house comes into focus. While utilized in linking phrases such as “as I sit at this” (Line 30) and “I can almost see” (Line 32), the “s” most often dominates in the descriptions of location, clothing, and skin. The speaker describes the “bare child’s feet on the scorched floorboards” (Line 31) and, as if this ignites the child itself, speaks of “[their] burning clothes, the thin green shorts / and grubby yellow T-shirt” (Lines 33-34). This focus on the flaming child is made particularly visceral as the repetitions of “s” get closer together as the clothes hold the “cindery, non-existent, / radiant flesh. Incandescent” (Lines 35-36). This increase of the “s” sound mimics the sounds of fire itself, such that the image of the child burning suggests the crackling of flames and the hiss of spark.
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