More And More - Analysis

Desire as a fantasy of harmless absorption

The poem’s central claim is unsettlingly frank: the speaker’s love (or longing) is not primarily about sharing a world with you, but about wanting to take that world inside herself until the edges / of me dissolve. At first she tries to imagine this hunger as benign, even beautiful. She wants to assimilate the world the way a plant exchanges air, slipping through the skin and living by a harmless green burning. That plant-image matters because it offers a model of intimacy without injury: photosynthesis is a kind of consuming that doesn’t leave a corpse behind.

The tone here is dreamy, persuasive, almost tender: she insists she would not consume the beloved or finish them. In her best version of herself, the beloved remains complete / as the air, surrounding her rather than being reduced by her need. But even in this “gentle” fantasy, there’s a pressure: the beloved is still being turned into atmosphere, into something that exists everywhere, for the speaker’s survival.

The turn: Unfortunately I don’t have leaves

The poem pivots sharply on a single, almost comic line: Unfortunately I don’t have leaves. That word unfortunately is doing heavy moral work. It suggests the speaker genuinely prefers the nonviolent version of hunger, the plant version, but can’t inhabit it. What she does have is unmistakably animal and human: eyes / and teeth. Eyes imply fixating, targeting, choosing; teeth imply tearing and taking. The speaker even lists other non-green / things, as if her whole body is implicated in the problem. Where the plant would manage closeness through osmosis, the human body “rules out” that peaceful method, forcing desire into a more dangerous economy of bite and need.

A love poem that becomes a warning

Once teeth enter, the voice changes from wishful to urgent. The speaker tells the beloved, So be careful, and then underlines it: I mean it. The poem stops trying to be romantic and starts trying to be honest. The hunger she describes draws / everything into its own / space—a gravitational image that makes desire feel less like a choice than a pull that reorganizes the room around itself. Even conversation can’t save them: they can we / talk it all over, but the phrase arrives only to be denied. The speaker rejects the fantasy that intimacy can be negotiated into safety with a calm / rational discussion. Reasonable language is presented as too thin to restrain the appetite at work.

The key tension: wanting you intact, wanting you inside

The poem’s deepest contradiction is that the speaker wants two incompatible outcomes. She wants the beloved to remain still… there and complete, yet she also wants to bring them into her own body’s boundaries until her self dissolves. Even her attempt to make the beloved surrounding me has a subtle possessiveness: the beloved becomes the medium in which the speaker lives, like air, like oxygen, like a necessary element. The poem doesn’t let the reader settle into a simple moral stance—there’s no villainous declaration of domination. Instead there’s a troubling self-knowledge: the speaker can name the desire’s violence even as she continues to feel it.

Starvation logic and the end of explanations

The closing lines strip away any comforting psychology. There is no reason for this, the speaker says, only a starved dog’s logic—a mind narrowed to bones, to the next necessary thing. That comparison refuses glamour. It also clarifies why the earlier plant fantasy fails: plants do not experience hunger as panic, but the starved animal does. By ending on bones, Atwood makes the desire physical and blunt, reducing the grand wish to assimilate the world into a desperate, single-track need.

And the poem leaves an uncomfortable question hanging in the air: if this hunger truly has no reason, what could the beloved possibly do—other than keep distance—to avoid being pulled into that own / space the speaker admits she cannot fully control?