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 aren’t 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
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Verbal irony- when she says hollow bones, she’s 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 can’t 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- she’s 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 didn’t always have a voice. That
being able to have your own voice is very important.