Illusion and Identity in Atwood’s Essay

Identity in Atwoods This is a lose it of Me In her poetry This is a Photograph of Me, author Margaret Atwood uses imagery and contrast to explore issues of fondness versus reality as well as identity. The poem is split into two halves. The offset half(prenominal)(a) contains descriptive words rough scenery and natural objects, and the second half, touch by parentheses, begins with the unnerving surprise that the fabricator is dead.The poem opens with a exposition of a picture that at first seems blurry but soft comes into digest, wish well a enter slowly developing, that even resembles a written poem itself (blurred lines and grey flecks/blended with the paper. ) The second and third stanzas go on to describe objects in the picture, including a small frame house, a lake, and some low hills. The first half has a reminiscent and descriptive t unitary, falsely leading the reader along with serenity.But even here, there is a shroud of mystery, with a description not just of a branch, but of a thing that is like a branch, and the house is central up/ what ought to be a gentle slope, not halfway up a gentle slope. What could this mean? The calm albeit mysterious peacefulness of the first half ends with the fourth stanzas jarring declaration, beginning with an opening parenthesis, that the image the narrator is describing was taken/ the day by and by she dr stimulateed. The pace of the poem after this revelation seems frantic, searching for the narrator in the lake, which was in the first half described as being in the background and now in the center/ of the picture. The narrator tells the reader that what can be seen is distorted and one must look intently, playing with the themes of illusion and identity. Perhaps the ambiguity of the poem and the exploration of illusion and identity are hinting at a womens rightist perspective that a womans true spirit is cloudiness by a male-dominated society.Or perhaps the poems focus is eluding to a more u niversal human search for identity, a with a narrator who is unsure and obscured, but just under the surface, nearly to break out previously dead but now reborn, to recoup a new path. Or perhaps the author is talking about poetry or literature itself and the authors hidden intentions lurking in the work. As noted earlier, the description of the ikon at the beginning resembles a description of a poem blurred lines and grey flecks/ blended with the paper, like lines of writing and the letters comprising words.The author dies with the birth of her poem, when the piece lives on its own but the author is still there, somewhere, her intentions a key part of the text. The photograph in the poem, in the first half, is described as smeared and blurred and in the second half there is still distortion. So instead of disclosing the narrators story and identity, no resolution is apparent. On the contrary, the photograph creates illusion and obscures identity. The reader is left with uncerta inty, just like the blurred and distorted photograph of the poem.