21 pages • 42-minute read
Morning in the Burned House
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Symbols & Motifs
Melted Dishware
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
The melted domestic items become important symbols in the poem, illustrating The Complexities of Memory. The first items that Atwood’s speaker recounts in the vision of the house are from a long-ago “breakfast” (Line 1): a “spoon” (Line 4) and “bowl” (Line 5). These items are evocative of several things that strengthen the setting and the feeling of nostalgia, as they indicate the tools with which one generally eats cereal or oatmeal. These foodstuffs are usually given to children of a younger age, corroborated by the speaker’s “bare child’s feet” (Line 31).
Furthermore, the items fit in with the domestic setting of “the woodstove / with its grate and sooty kettle” (Lines 11-12) and “the morning table” (Line 30). The fact that they are “melted” (Lines 4-5) indicates not only their physical destruction from the burning of the house but also the loss of the childhood self, as the speaker recalls them since “there is no breakfast” (Line 2). Atwood also might be alluding to the tonal qualities of surrealist painter Salvador Dali in creating her speaker’s picture of the past. Dali often blended hyper-realism and melting subjects to comment on dreams and memory, such as in 1931’s The Persistence of Memory and The Dream.
The Coming Storm
Another symbol that hints at the disaster of what happened to the house is the description of how “[i]n the east a bank of cloud / rises up silently like dark bread” (Lines 17-18). As Atwood has written, the small cabin that her family owned for a period of several years was hit by lightning during a storm just as Atwood entered adulthood (See: Further Reading & Resources). The cloud, in this vision/memory, might literally be the one that developed into the storm that produced the fateful strike of lightning. Metaphorically, it shows that changes in life stages are “like dark bread” (Line 18), heavy but ultimately nourishing.
Since, in the collection of the same name, “Morning in the Burned House” is placed after a series of poems about the death of the poet’s father, the image here also reflects the storm of grief that occurs watching someone die. The memory that the speaker has is “happy” (Line 30), and thus it is painful to know that the house, the father, and the child who loved him no longer exist.
The Flawed Mirror
The “mirror” (Line 14) that the speaker imagines as part of the remembered house is “rippled” (Line 14). This suggests that the glass of the mirror is in some way bent or distorted, perhaps by the fire that the speaker seems to want to deny. This object symbolically shows that the speaker’s view of themselves may be distorted in some way or that their view of the past isn’t completely accurate.
This ambiguity helps add to the sense of tension that arises from the slipperiness of dreams. It also hints at the unreliability of the narration, which has been set up early with the information that the speaker isn’t really in the house since it “has long been over’ (Line 25). The mirror suggests that the speaker’s insistence that “every detail [is] clear” (Line 13) is a fabrication. The mirror serves as another object that reflects the fire’s damage and the elusiveness of the past.
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