Literary Analysis Of Margaret Atwood's 'February'

For the duration of the winter months, people tend to develop habits specific the season. They make attempts to hide themselves under their thick covers in the icy mornings to avoid having to leave them behind. They put on a few, or perhaps more than a few, pounds to insulate their cold bones. Bitter or melancholy moods set in to reflect the weather. In Margaret Atwood’s poem, “February”, she makes use of similes and metaphors to compare humans to animals in order to emphasize her gloomy, apathetic tone in her discussion of human survival during the winter months.
Immediately as the poem begins, the speaker exposes the tone. As the narrator awakens on a February morning, it is evident that her feelings toward winter are far from cheerful. In the first two lines she states, “Winter. Time to eat fat / and watch hockey.” Right off the bat the tone of the poem becomes negative. While some may find watching hockey to be a pleasant, fun pastime, the speaker phrases it in a distinctly apathetic manner through her use of a short, choppy sentence. This implies that this action is simply part of a routine and she feels indifferent towards it. When she mentions eating “fat”, this means that her eating habits have become unhealthy, mirroring her …show more content…
In line ten, she says, “Some other tomcat / not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door, / declaring war.” Here, she is speaking of a dispute between her own cat and another in the neighborhood. However, as she goes on, things take a turn: “It’s all about sex and territory, / which are what will finish us off / in the long run.” Suddenly, she is no longer speaking about her cat; she is talking about herself and human race as a whole. She relates human race to her cat’s situation in a negative manner, shown by the phrase “which are what will finish us off / in the long run.” This perpetuates her apathetic, gloomy