Spelling
Spelling - meaning Summary
Language, Power, and Motherhood
The poem links a child learning letters with ancestral and female experiences of silence and violence to argue that language is a form of power and survival. Atwood contrasts motherhood and poetic creation, traces oppressive histories—witch-burning and war—to show speech emerging from bodily suffering, and insists naming and early words form identity. The final lines suggest spelling is both literal learning and reclaiming voice through primal, personal naming.
Read Complete AnalysesMy daughter plays on the floor with plastic letters, red, blue & hard yellow, learning how to spell, spelling, how to make spells. * I wonder how many women denied themselves daughters, closed themselves in rooms, drew the curtains so they could mainline words. * A child is not a poem, a poem is not a child. There is no either / or. However. * I return to the story of the woman caught in the war & in labour, her thighs tied together by the enemy so she could not give birth. Ancestress: the burning witch, her mouth covered by leather to strangle words. A word after a word after a word is power. * At the point where language falls away from the hot bones, at the point where the rock breaks open and darkness flows out of it like blood, at the melting point of granite when the bones know they are hollow & the word splits & doubles & speaks the truth & the body itself becomes a mouth. This is a metaphor. * How do you learn to spell? Blood, sky & the sun, your own name first, your first naming, your first name, your first word.
this is powerful, a true work of poetry genius, just reading fills my heart with the deepest passion. Oh, Margaret Atwood Vous êtes un génie as the French would say.