You Fit Into Me

Margaret Atwood writes in a vivid, witty and often sharply discomfiting style in all of her literary works. To call her a feminist author is in a way selling her short as her work, while often centered on issues of gender, has also focused on Canadian national identity, Canada's relations with the United States and Europe, human rights issues, environmental issues, and the Canadian wilderness. The poem that I chose to analyze is a very short poem consisting of only four lines titled "You Fit Into Me." It was originally published in Margaret Atwood's anthology Power Politics, but the book I read it in is called, To Hell With Love, which is a collection of poems dealing with heartache and healing after a
In the first line, the "you" and "me" are directly related to each other. From this line, we can understand that there are two people who are being talked about (one being the narrator). In her very next line, the "hook" and the "eye" further describe the "you" and "me." On each side of the word "like," we are given two concepts that can be related to one another. Both sides of this equation are complete; therefore, we have little trouble discerning what is being compared.

"You fit into me / Like a hook into an eye," presents a friendly image of a hook fitting nicely into an eye enclosure. The mood of the poem drastically changes in the next line as the once pleasant image is now a sharp fishhook puncturing an eyeball. What at first appears to be a conventional, even silly love poem quickly becomes dark and harrowing. Atwood overturns the expected definition of "hook and eye" and replaces it with an image of brutality and violence. She establishes very specific expectations and then gleefully tramples on them. The power of her diction hinges on the multiple meanings of a few short words. "You Fit Into Me" succinctly captures Atwood's interest in the mechanisms of language, the multiplicity of words and the many layers of