Hmm. Have you seen this?
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Let's mix this up a bit. Here is a poem by Marge Percy titled A Work of Artifice. Read it. Ask who is the speaker. Look at word choice, identify the tone. Are there allusions? Images? Any figurative language? Now let's "scan" it. Scansion is when you look a lines of verse to identify rhythm. So, look at each line and identify the number of syllables per line. Does this tell you anything? What is the setting or situation? IS there any irony? Does anything symbolize something else? The bonsai tree in the attractive pot could have grown eighty feet tall on the side of a mountain till split by lightning. But a gardener carefully pruned it. It is nine inches high. Every day as he whittles back the branches the gardener croons, It is your nature to be small and cozy, domestic and weak; how lucky, little tree, to have a pot to grow in. With living creatures one must begin very early to dwarf their growth: the bound feet, the crippled brain, the h...
Let's start at the start. The dress of the handmaids. On page 8 and 9 the handmaids' costumes are described indirectly as Offred gets dressed and then on page 9, walks down the stairs, seeing herself in a hallway mirror. It is description loaded with imagery and symbolism. Atwood writes, "There remains a mirror, on the hall wall. If I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see it as I go down the stairs, round, convex, a pier class, like the eye of a fish, and myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairy-tale figure in a red cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A sister, dipped in blood" (9). Whoah - so what strikes me is a lot. I will mention just one thing I notice about this description, and then ask you to notice things and ask yourselves what Atwood meant by them. So - I ask myself - Why is that mirror round, convex, a pier glass, like the ...