Decontrusting Spelling by Margaret Atwood

1. Examine the title of the poem

Learning how to spell
Title only mentions writing in first and last stanza
2. Words
Words
Mainline

Ancestress

Hollow
metaphor

Denotations
-A principle road or railroad
line
-having a principle or
dominant status
-female ancestor
-someone more distant than
a grandmother or
grandfather
-surface depression or cavity
hole
-an implied comparison
between two unlike things

Connotations
-injection of drugs

-witchcraft
-a woman from long ago

-empty/ words arent true

-hidden message

3. Grammar/Punctuation
A lot of commas, periods at the ends of stanzas, colons, slashes, question mark
There is a lot of run-on sentences. 9 verses. The word however appears on a line and
in a sentence by itself.
No indentations
4. Poetic Devices
Alliteration: denied themselves daughters (8)
Allusion: I return to the story / of the woman caught in the war (16-17) ancestress:
the burning witch (21)
Ambiguity: spell (4) could be talking about words or magic; mainline- could be about
roads, power, drugs (11)
Animism: leather/ to strangle the words (22-23); rocks breaks open and darkness/
flows out of it like blood (28-29) when the bones know (31)
Apostrophe- the writer is telling a story
Hyperbole- the woman caught in the war (17) exaggerated to show seriousness
Irony: this is a metaphor (36) because the speaker is telling us it is the metaphor
Metaphor- This is a metaphor (36) Is it metaphor? the body/ itself becomes a
mouth (34-35)
Overstatement- most of the poem- using exaggeration for serious effect
Point of view- first person, speaker uses I
Repetition: spell, word and name- stresses the importance

Verbal irony- when she says hollow bones, shes not really talking about the bones
Simile: rocks breaks open and darkness/ flows out of it like blood (28-29)
Synecdoche- bones know- the bones represent people
Stanzas- there are 9
Speaker- is a storyteller
Symbols- the woman caught in the war (17)- represent struggles in the past the
ancestress: burning witch (21) represent struggles women had in the past; plastic
letters represent language

5. Paraphrase
Her daughter plays on the floor with colored plastic letters making words.
Wonder how many women concealed themselves from their own world and others.
A poem and a child are not the same thing. They are similarities.
But
She is at war with her enemy and with herself.
Witches who were burned at the stake, not being allowed to speak.
Words have powerful meaning.
When a person cant voice their opinion, they finally crack and say it anyway. And others
twist your words, but in the end, the truth comes out.
This is a hidden meaning.
Learning to spell easy words first such as your name.
6. Tone & Mood
a. Tone- shes questioning the past. Words, language are/ is important to the speaker in
the poem.
b. Mood- it goes from happy to dark and sad.
7. Reexamine title.
The poem spells out the story of how women didnt always have a voice. That
being able to have your own voice is very important.