Margaret Atwood's “You Come Back” summary and analysis

Margaret Atwood „s “You Come Back”

MORNING IN THE BURNED HOUSE
by Margaret Atwood
Houghton Mifflin Company
215 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10003
ISBN 0-395-75591-3
ISBN 0-395-82521-0 (pbk.)
144 pp., $16.00
www.hmco.com
Margaret Atwood’s collection of poems, Morning in the Burned House, could just as easily have employed morning’s homonym—mourning—in the title. The overriding theme of loss and some of its sources and consequences—aging, grief, death, depression, and anger—permeate this collection and, in particular, Section IV which is a series of elegiac poems about Atwood’s father.
The collection is divided into five sections. Section I opens with the poem “You Come Back.” This poem seems to look back on a life lived in a blur in which much was missed, as evidenced by the lines:
You come back into the room
where you’ve been living
all along. You say:
What’s been going on
while I was away?. . .
. . .You know it was you
who slept, who ate here, though you don’t
believe it. I must have taken
time off, you think, for the buttered
toast and the love. . .
. . . but no,
now you’re certain, someone else
has been here wearing
your clothes and saying
words for you, because there was no time off.
The speaker of this poem seems shocked that he/she has missed so much, has let so much pass him/her by. As this section continues on, we are faced with the speaker’s musing about depression (“Sad Child” and “February”), loneliness (“In the Secular Night”), and aging and/or death (“Waiting” and “Asparagus.”) In the final poem in this section, “Red Fox,” the speaker has no illusions about humanity and how far people will go to get what they need and want. There is also a particularly feminine quality to this form of survival, as evidenced by the use of “vixen” and the references to mothers and children. In this way, “Red Fox” prepares us for what is to come in Section II.
Sections II and III explore the speaker’s anger created by different forms of loss: aging, exploitation, chances not taken, destruction and violence, and, ultimately, death. Many of these poems showcase the speaker’s feminist sensibilities, especially the opening poems of Section II—“Miss July Grows Older,” “Cressida to Troilus: A Gift,” and “Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing.” The latter poem in particular echoes the last poem in Section I, “Red Fox”:
The world is full of women
who’d tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they’d say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I’ve a choice
of how, and I’ll take the money.
Again, we see the lack of illusion regarding what we would do to survive, as well as the speaker’s awareness of how women have been exploited and oppressed by both genders.
As the volume moves into Section III, the speaker’s anger becomes more diffuse, encompassing subjects such as the environment, language, and war. However, there is still an overall tone of cynicism, sometimes laced with guilt, regarding humankind. These feelings are particularly evident in the opening poem in Section III, “Romantic,” in which the speaker lays the blame for women’s oppression and exploitation squarely on women. In “Cell,” a poem in which the speaker compares humans to a cancer cell, the speaker’s cynicism is evident:
. . .The lab technician
says, It has forgotten
how to die. But why remember? All it wants is more
amnesia. More life, and more abundantly. To take
more. To eat more. To replicate itself. To keep on
doing those things forever. Such desires
are not unknown. Look in the mirror.
Section II and III maintain the hard veneer of bargains made and humankind’s denial of its effect on the world around it and on one another. The tone of these sections only softens (and just a bit, at that) in the last poem of Section III, “A Pink Hotel in California.” This poem leads us into Section IV and a series of elegiac poems about Atwood’s/the speaker’s father.
Throughout Section IV, the speaker deals with her feelings of loss: her father’s slipping away into old age and Alzheimer’s and his eventual death. The final poem in Section IV “The Ottawa River by Night,” segues smoothly into Section V. “The Ottawa River by Night” begins hinting at the speaker’s sense of mortality, and Section V continues to explore and strengthen that sense.
The collection ends with “Morning in the Burned House,” in which the speaker mourns a life that has slipped by, sometimes barely noticed, and nearing its end:
I can’t see my own arms and legs
or know if this is a trap or blessing,
finding myself back here, where everything
in this house has long been over,
kettle and mirror, spoon and bowl,
including my own body,
including the body I had then,
including the body I have now
as I sit at this morning table, alone and happy, . . .
In this way, Atwood circles back to the beginning of the volume and “You Come Back,” lamenting the tunnel vision we as humans can have while living our lives and mourning the loss of opportunities for awareness, connection, and something more.
If the entire collection of 45 poems becomes the 46th poem, we can see how this collection comes together to create a speaker who is going through the classic seven stages of grief: shock, denial, bargaining, guilt, anger, depression, and hope. It is grief that permeates this volume, whether it is the grief over the loss of a parent, the grief over our own mortality, or the grief over our own cruelty and violence. In the end, the grief in our lives circles back to our own awareness, which is what the speaker/Atwood is trying to tell us: Pay attention. Don’t let it all slip away.

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SONNET 18 PARAPHRASE + analysis + ترجمة للعربي

SONNET 18	PARAPHRASE
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?	Shall I compare you to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:	You are more lovely and more constant:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,	Rough winds shake the beloved buds of May
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:	And summer is far too short:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,	At times the sun is too hot,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;	Or often goes behind the clouds;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,	And everything beautiful sometime will lose its beauty,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;	By misfortune or by nature's planned out course.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade	But your youth shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;	Nor will you lose the beauty that you possess;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,	Nor will death claim you for his own,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:	Because in my eternal verse you will live forever.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,	So long as there are people on this earth,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.	So long will this poem live on, making you immortal.

ANALYSIS temperate (1): i.e., evenly-tempered; not overcome by passion. the eye of heaven (5): i.e., the sun. every fair from fair sometime declines (7): i.e., the beauty (fair) of everything beautiful (fair) will fade (declines). Compare to Sonnet 116: "rosy lips and cheeks/Within his bending sickle's compass come." nature's changing course (8): i.e., the natural changes age brings. that fair thou ow'st (10): i.e., that beauty you possess. in eternal lines...growest (12): The poet is using a grafting metaphor in this line. Grafting is a technique used to join parts from two plants with cords so that they grow as one. Thus the beloved becomes immortal, grafted to time with the poet's cords (his "eternal lines"). For commentary on whether this sonnet is really "one long exercise in self-glorification", please see below. Sonnet 18 is the best known and most well-loved of all 154 sonnets. It is also one of the most straightforward in language and intent. The stability of love and its power to immortalize the poetry and the subject of that poetry is the theme. The poet starts the praise of his dear friend without ostentation, but he slowly builds the image of his friend into that of a perfect being. His friend is first compared to summer in the octave, but, at the start of the third quatrain (9), he is summer, and thus, he has metamorphosed into the standard by which true beauty can and should be judged. من موقع : http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/18detail.html شرح اخر 1. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? This is taken usually to mean 'What if I were to compare thee etc?' The stock comparisons of the loved one to all the beauteous things in nature hover in the background throughout. One also remembers Wordsworth's lines:  We'll talk of sunshine and of song, And summer days when we were young,  Sweet childish days which were as long As twenty days are now. Such reminiscences are indeed anachronistic, but with the recurrence of words such as 'summer', 'days', 'song', 'sweet', it is not difficult to see the permeating influence of the Sonnets on Wordsworth's verse. 2. Thou art more lovely and more temperate: The youth's beauty is more perfect than the beauty of a summer day. more temperate - more gentle, more restrained, whereas the summer's day might have violent excesses in store, such as are about to be described. 3. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, May was a summer month in Shakespeare's time, because the calendar in use lagged behind the true sidereal calendar by at least a fortnight.  darling buds of May - the beautiful, much loved buds of the early summer; favourite flowers. 4. And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Legal terminology. The summer holds a lease on part of the year, but the lease is too short, and has an early termination (date). 5. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, Sometime = on occasion, sometimes;  the eye of heaven = the sun. 6. And often is his gold complexion dimmed, his gold complexion = his (the sun's) golden face. It would be dimmed by clouds and on overcast days generally. 7. And every fair from fair sometime declines, All beautiful things (every fair) occasionally become inferior in comparison with their essential previous state of beauty (from fair). They all decline from perfection. 8. By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed: By chance accidents, or by the fluctuating tides of nature, which are not subject to control, nature's changing course untrimmed.  untrimmed - this can refer to the ballast (trimming) on a ship which keeps it stable; or to a lack of ornament and decoration. The greater difficulty however is to decide which noun this adjectival participle should modify. Does it refer to nature, or chance, or every fair in the line above, or to the effect of nature's changing course? KDJ adds a comma after course, which probably has the effect of directing the word towards all possible antecedents. She points out that nature's changing course could refer to women's monthly courses, or menstruation, in which case every fair in the previous line would refer to every fair woman, with the implication that the youth is free of this cyclical curse, and is therefore more perfect. 9. But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Referring forwards to the eternity promised by the ever living poet in the next few lines, through his verse. 10. Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, Nor shall it (your eternal summer) lose its hold on that beauty which you so richly possess. ow'st = ownest, possess.  By metonymy we understand 'nor shall you lose any of your beauty'. 11. Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade, Several half echoes here. The biblical ones are probably 'Oh death where is thy sting? Or grave thy victory?' implying that death normally boasts of his conquests over life. And Psalms 23.3.: 'Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil ' In classical literature the shades flitted helplessly in the underworld like gibbering ghosts. Shakespeare would have been familiar with this through Virgil's account of Aeneas' descent into the underworld in Aeneid Bk. VI. 12. When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st, in eternal lines = in the undying lines of my verse. Perhaps with a reference to progeny, and lines of descent, but it seems that the procreation theme has already been abandoned.  to time thou grow'st - you keep pace with time, you grow as time grows. 13. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, For as long as humans live and breathe upon the earth, for as long as there are seeing eyes on the eart. 14. So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. That is how long these verses will live, celebrating you, and continually renewing your life. But one is left with a slight residual feeling that perhaps the youth's beauty will last no longer than a summer's day, despite the poet's proud boast.  من موقع : http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/18 شرح اخر من موقع سبارك نوت : Summary The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” The next eleven lines are devoted to such a comparison. In line 2, the speaker stipulates what mainly differentiates the young man from the summer’s day: he is “more lovely and more temperate.” Summer’s days tend toward extremes: they are shaken by “rough winds”; in them, the sun (“the eye of heaven”) often shines “too hot,” or too dim. And summer is fleeting: its date is too short, and it leads to the withering of autumn, as “every fair from fair sometime declines.” The final quatrain of the sonnet tells how the beloved differs from the summer in that respect: his beauty will last forever (“Thy eternal summer shall not fade...”) and never die. In the couplet, the speaker explains how the beloved’s beauty will accomplish this feat, and not perish because it is preserved in the poem, which will last forever; it will live “as long as men can breathe or eyes can see.” Commentary This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets; it may be the most famous lyric poem in English. Among Shakespeare’s works, only lines such as “To be or not to be” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” are better-known. This is not to say that it is at all the best or most interesting or most beautiful of the sonnets; but the simplicity and loveliness of its praise of the beloved has guaranteed its place. On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about the beauty of the beloved; summer tends to unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate. Summer is incidentally personified as the “eye of heaven” with its “gold complexion”; the imagery throughout is simple and unaffected, with the “darling buds of May” giving way to the “eternal summer”, which the speaker promises the beloved. The language, too, is comparatively unadorned for the sonnets; it is not heavy with alliteration or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-contained clause—almost every line ends with some punctuation, which effects a pause. Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage the young man to have children. The “procreation” sequence of the first 17 sonnets ended with the speaker’s realization that the young man might not need children to preserve his beauty; he could also live, the speaker writes at the end of Sonnet 17, “in my rhyme.” Sonnet 18, then, is the first “rhyme”—the speaker’s first attempt to preserve the young man’s beauty for all time. An important theme of the sonnet (as it is an important theme throughout much of the sequence) is the power of the speaker’s poem to defy time and last forever, carrying the beauty of the beloved down to future generations. The beloved’s “eternal summer” shall not fade precisely because it is embodied in the sonnet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” the speaker writes in the couplet, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” من موقع : http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/shakesonnets/section2.rhtml شرح اخر : ::Analysis:: Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet is, perhaps, one of the best-known sonnets contained in the English literary canon. It is a conventional Shakespearean sonnet that explores conventional themes in an original way.  With characteristic skill Shakespeare uses the sonnet to exalt poetry and his beloved. The first quatrain introduces the primary conceit of the sonnet, the comparison of the speaker’s beloved to a summer’s day.  In the first line the speaker introduces the comparison of his beloved to a summer’s day.  The speaker then builds on this comparison when he writes,  “Thou art more lovely and more temperate” (2) because he is describing his beloved in a way that could also describe summer.  When he describes “rough winds [that] do shake the darling buds of May,”  (3) he is using rough winds as a metaphor for capricious chance and change,  and he implies that his beloved does not suffer from these winds as summer does.  The first quatrain, therefore, introduces a comparison that is expanded upon by the remaining two quatrains. The second quatrain strengthens the comparison of the beloved to a summer’s day.  The speaker anthropomorphizes the sky, or “heaven,” (5) by using the metaphor of an “eye” (5) for the sun so that the comparison between a person and a season becomes vivid.  By assigning heaven an “eye,” the speaker invokes the image of his beloved’s eyes.  Similarly, in the next line when the speaker mentions that summer’s “gold complexion” is often “dimmed,” ( 6) he is attempting to compare another human attribute of his beloved with some trait of summer.  The second quatrain presents summer as possessing only mutable beauty. The third quatrain no longer focuses on the mutability of summer, but it speaks of the nearly eternal nature of the memory of the beloved.  When the speaker assures his beloved that her “eternal summer shall not fade,” (9) he is using summer as a metaphor for her beauty. Using the word “fade” facilitates the comparison of the abstract notion of a summer’s day to the concrete person of the beloved because fading is a quality of light.  Similarly, when the speaker writes of the beloved entering the “shade” (10) of death, he is expanding on the use of the metaphor and reinforcing the poem’s primary conceit. When the speaker boasts that his beloved will not suffer the same fate as a summer’s day because he has committed her to “eternal lines,” (12) he adds the theme of poetry itself to a sonnet that had previously been a love poem.  Shakespeare gives his beloved immortality through poetry that God did not give to a summer’s day. The couplet concludes the sonnet by tying together the themes of love and poetry.  In it the speaker starkly contrasts the life spans of his poem and his beloved’s memory to the fleeting nature of a summer’s day.  He boasts that, unlike a summer’s day, his poetry and the memory of his beloved will last “so long as men can breathe or eyes can see” (13).  This last comparison provides a stark contrast to the time period, “a summer’s day,” (1) introduced at the beginning and exalts poetry along with the beloved. Shakespeare used a conventional form of poetry to praise poetry and his beloved. He boasted that both would be preserved nearly eternally. Five hundred years later, no one refutes his boast. ------------------- هذه هى القصيدة رقم 18 الشهيرة التى يبدأ فيها شكسبير بعقد مقارنة بين جمال محبوبته واعتدال الجو فى يوم من أيام الصيفالأنجليزى ثم ينكر هذه المقارنة لأن الصيف فصل متقلب وينتهى الىان محبوبته تكسر حدود الزمن لأن الشاعر قد خلدها فى قصيدته التى لابد أن يكتب لها الخلود فى رأيه وأن ينشدها الناس على مر الزمان.ولتلك القصيدة ترجمتانالترجمة الأولى ألا تشبهين صفاء المصيف بل أنت أحلى وأصفى سماء ففى الصيف تعصف ريح الذبول وتعبث فى برعمات الربيع ولا يلبث الصيف حتى يزول وفى الصيف تسطع عين السماء ويحتدم القيظ مثل الأتون وفى الصيف يحجب عنا السحاب ضيا السما وجمال ذكاء وما من جميل يظل جميلا فشيمة كل البرايا الفناء ولكن صيفك ذا لن يغيب ولن تفتقدى فيه نور الجمال ولن يتباهى الفناء الرهيب بأنك تمشين بين الظلال اذا صغت منك قصيد الأبد فمادام فى الأرض ناس تعيش ومادام فيها عيون ترى فسوف يردد شعرى الزمان وفيه تعيشين بين الورى والترجمة الثانية لفطينه النائب- من كتاب فن الترجمة- للدكتور صفاء خلوصى- 1986 من ذا يقارن حسنك المغرى بصيف قد تجلى وفنون سحرك قد بدت فى ناظرى أسمى وأغلىتجنى الرياح العاتيات على البراعم وهى جذلى والصيف يمضى مسرعا اذ عقده المحدود ولى كم أشرقت عين السماء بحرها تلتهب ولكم خبا فى وجهها الذهبى نور يغرب لابد للحسن البهى عن الجميل سيذهب فالدهر تغير واطوار الطبيعة قلب لكن صيفك سرمدى ما اعتراه ذبول لن يفقد الحسن الذى ملكت فيه بخيل والموت لن يزهو بظلك فى حماه يجول ستعاصرين الدهر فى شعرى وفيه أقول: ما دامت الأنفاس تصعد والعيون تحدق سيظل شعرى خالداً وعليك عمراً يغدق

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English Poetry from Romantics to Moderns Lecture 6

· B-The Neo- Platonic idea that the soul is the essential of man; the essence (soul) of mankind is the same, but what differs is their bodies in which their souls are imprisoned.

· فكرة النيو افلاطوني بإن الروح هي ضرورية للإنسان، والجوهر )الروح( للجنس

البشري هو نفسه، ولكن ما يختلف هو أجسادهم التي يتم فيها سجن نفوسهم

· Once it is set free (by the death of the body) it goes back to its divine origin which is God.

· عندما يتم تعيين الحرية )بسبب وفاة من الجسم( انه يعود الى أصله الإلهي الذي هو

الله

· The body whether black or white, is a colored cloud that will disappear one day, while the soul goes back to its creator.

· الجسم سواء أسود أو أبيض، سحابة ملونة من شأنها أن تختفي يوما واحدا، في حين

أن الروح تعود إلى الخالق

· The Little Black Boy

· Summary

· A black child tells the story of how he came to know his own identity and to know God.

· طفل أسود يحكي قصة كيف انه جاء لمعرفة هويته ومعرفة الله.

· The boy, who was born in “the southern wild” of Africa, first explains that though his skin is black his soul is as white as that of an English child.

· الصبي، الذي ولد في "البرية في جنوب" لأفريقيا، أولا ويوضح أنه على الرغم من

بشرته سوداء روحه بيضاء كما أن طفل إنجليزي

· He relates how his loving mother taught him about God who lives in the East, who gives light and life to all creation and comfort and joy to men.

· يروي كيف أن والدته محبة علمته عن الله الذي يعيش في الشرق، الذي يعطي -

الضوء والحياة لجميع الخلق والراحة والفرح على الرجال.

· “We are put on earth,” his mother says, to learn to accept God’s love.

· وضعنا على وجه الأرض "، وتقول والدته، ليتعلم لقبول محبة الله.

· ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

· ROMANTIC POETRY

· He is told that his black skin “is but a cloud” that will be dissipated when his soul meets God in heaven.

· وقيل له إن بشرته السوداء "ليست سوى سحابة" سوف تتبدد أنه عندما تجتمع روحه

الله في السماء

· The black boy passes on this lesson to an English child, explaining that his white skin is likewise a cloud.

· الصبي الأسود يمر على هذا الدرس لطفل إنجليزي، موضحا أن بشرته البيضاء

وبمثل السحابة

· He vows that when they are both free of their bodies and delighting in the presence of God, he will shade his white friend until he, too, learns to bear the heat of God’s love.

· نذر أن عندما تكون خالية من كل من أجسادهم والابتهاج في وجود الله، وانه سيظلل

صديقه الأبيض حتى أنه، أيضا، يتعلم أن يتحمل الحرارة لمحبة الله

· Then, the black boy says, he will be like the English boy, and the English boy will love him.

· الصبي الأسود يقول سوف يكون مثل الصبي الإنجليزي، والصبي الإنجليزي سوف

يحبه__

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