Morning in the Burned House

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.