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Analysis Of The Siren Song By Margaret Atwood

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The “Siren Song” was written by Margaret Atwood and was part of her 1974 collection, You Are Happy. Her poem is based off Homer’s The Odyssey, where the hero Odysseus is able to resist the sirens, but his men were attracted by the melodic voice of the sirens. Atwood adapts this myth by creating her poem from the perspective of one of the sirens, which is in first-person voice. The way Atwood structured her poem is concise because it represents the three sirens in Greek mythology. Atwood’s use of word choice is very clever and particular because it makes the reader feel sorry for the siren and makes the reader want to help save her. In the “Siren Song” Margaret Atwood portrays a strong message about the threats of luring into the deceptions of life through the use of mythological allusions, point of view of the speaker, sentence structure, diction, theme, imagery, and tone. The sirens in …show more content…

The “Siren Song” is written in free verse, so it displays no formal pattern of rhyme and is without regular meter. The sentence structure is very simple and straightforward to help maintain the casual informal voice of the narrator. The use of enjambment in the sentence structure builds suspense and makes the reader fall deeper into the Siren’s song. Her use of enjambment also makes the poems more one sided dialogue and the appeal starts off soft and intriguing and then it moves faster with a sense of urgency. The sentence structure by Atwood helps the reader not feel bored, but instead keeps the reader feel more uptight and curious about what “the secret” the siren mentions really is (Atwood 10). The last couple of stanzas are structured nicely because the speaker tells the reader to “Come closer” which indicates it’s the last final ruse the narrator does to trap the reader in the intimacy (Atwood

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