Morning in the Burned House

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

Margaret Atwood’s “Morning in the Burned House” highlights the illusory quality of memory that comes after loss. Further, it shows how difficult mourning can be, posing the question of how long someone should hold onto the past and how to move on. As the last poem in its self-titled collection, “Morning in the Burned House” explores the complexities of memory.

The poem begins with the speaker “eating breakfast” (Line 1) in “the burned house” (Line 1) before quickly noting that “there is no house, there is no breakfast” (Line 2). When the speaker confesses, “[Y]et here I am” (Line 3), they acknowledge the space of their experience as liminal. It is a space of dream and memory—a mental threshold that one can escape to when they feel nostalgic. Due to the homonymic meaning that the title provides, this equates to a time of mourning for the speaker. Grief explains the vividness of the memory, as the speaker can hear how the “spoon […] scrapes against the bowl” (Lines 4-5). In reality, both items were “melted” (Lines 4-5) by the fire that burned the house down. The solidity with which the items in the house are described, with “every detail clear” (Line 13), deliberately contrasts with the fact that the house no longer exists.