February - Analysis

A winter comedy that keeps tripping over mortality

At the surface, February sounds like a deadpan domestic sketch: Time to eat fat / and watch hockey, a cat clowning on the bed, a neighbor tomcat spraying our front door. But the poem’s central claim is sharper and darker: winter exposes how thin the line is between comfort and extinction, and how the very drives that keep us alive—appetite, sex, love—also grind us down. Atwood’s humor isn’t a release valve; it’s a way of looking straight at dread without flinching.

The voice stays chatty and blunt, but it keeps letting the grim facts in. Even the pet’s affection is an investigation: the cat tries to get onto my head to see whether or not I’m dead. The joke lands, then it lingers—this household warmth is shadowed by the body’s basic vulnerability.

The cat as a warm, selfish litmus test

The cat is drawn in loving insult—a black fur sausage with Houdini eyes—and his needs are immediate: scratch me, feed me, heat me. Yet Atwood makes him a kind of practical philosopher. If the speaker is alive, he wants to be scratched; if I am / He’ll think of something. That line is funny because it’s coldly true: the cat represents life’s indifference, the way survival continues by improvisation, not by mourning.

Even his closeness is bodily and slightly disgusting: he breathes burped-up meat and musty sofas, purring like a washboard. The poem refuses a cute animal sentimentality. Warmth comes with stink; comfort comes with appetite. That’s the emotional weather of the poem: you can’t get the cozy parts without the animal parts.

Territory, sex, and the long-run doom under the doorstep

The neighbor tomcat’s spray turns the front door into a border: declaring war. The speaker’s leap from cat conflict to human destiny is abrupt but convincing: It’s all about sex and territory, / which are what will finish us off / in the long run. February isn’t only cold; it’s clarifying. When resources feel scarce, the poem suggests, the primal engines—possession, reproduction, dominance—show their teeth.

This is where Atwood’s tone sharpens into satire. She scolds local owners who should snip a few testicles, then extends the thought to wise / hominids, proposing we might even eat our young, like sharks. The exaggeration is comic, but it points to a real tension: if reason truly ruled us, we would manage our own destructiveness—yet we don’t, and the poem implies we may not even want to.

The hinge: love as the thing that ruins us

The poem’s crucial turn arrives with a blunt reversal: But it’s love that does us in. After blaming sex and territory, the speaker locates the deeper trap in attachment itself—what makes us build homes, have children, watch games, keep the heat on. The hockey chant He shoots, he scores! becomes a refrain of triumph that sits beside threat: famine / crouches in the bedsheets. Even the bed—supposedly the safest domestic space—turns into an ambush site.

Atwood knots together private comfort and collective damage: pollution pours / out of our chimneys to keep us warm. Love makes us protect our own bodies and rooms, and that protection, multiplied, becomes harm. The speaker doesn’t stand outside this; she’s in it, craving French fries / with a splash of vinegar while thinking dire thoughts. Desire persists even when despair is accurate.

The month as an emblem: despair with a pierced heart

When Atwood names the month directly—February, month of despair, / with a skewered heart in the centre—she fuses Valentine imagery with brutality. The heart is there, but it’s pierced, pinned like meat or an insect specimen. That image captures the poem’s central contradiction: what we call love is inseparable from appetite, vulnerability, and harm. February isn’t only a season; it’s a mood where affection feels like a wound you keep living inside.

A harsh prayer for spring, addressed to a pink bumhole

The ending swerves into a scolding plea: Cat, enough, Off my face!—and then the cat is abruptly promoted into metaphysics: You’re the life principle. It’s ridiculous and oddly moving. The speaker can’t reason herself into hope, so she demands it from the creature whose whole job is to insist on being alive. Get rid of death. Celebrate increase sounds like an impossible command, as if optimism were a chore that could be assigned.

The final line—Make it be spring—doesn’t claim spring will come; it begs for it, and it begs through irritation, not reverence. That’s Atwood’s winter truth: in February, even hope arrives with claws, need, and bad breath, and you take it anyway because it’s warm.